In a landmark settlement, Anthropic, a leading artificial intelligence company, has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors and publishers after a judge ruled it had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books, The New York Times reported. Anthropic will pay $3,000 per work to 500,000 authors. The Verge reported: In what’s potentially the first major payout to creatives whose work was used to train AI systems, Anthropic has reached an agreement to pay “at least” a staggering $1.5 billion, plus interest, to authors to settle its class-action lawsuit. As part of the settlement, Anthropic must also destroy the original files it downloaded and any copies. The Wall Street Journal reported: Artificial intelligence company Anthropic agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit over its use of pirated books to train large-language models.