Category: Business
AI firm Anthropic agrees to pay authors $1.5bn to settle piracy lawsuit
Artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5bn (£1.11bn) to settle a class action lawsuit filed by authors who said the company stole their work to train its AI models. The deal, which requires the approval of US District Judge William Alsup, would be the largest publicly-reported copyright recovery in history, according to lawyers for the authors. It comes two months after Judge Alsup found that using books to train AI did not violate US copyright law, but ordered Anthropic to stand trial over its use of pirated material. Anthropic said on Friday that the settlement would “resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.” The settlement comes as other big tech companies including ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Microsoft, and Instagram-parent Meta face lawsuits over similar alleged copyright violations. Anthropic, with its Claude chatbot, has long pitched itself as the ethical alternative among its competitors. “We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organisations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” said Aparna Sridhar, Deputy General Counsel at Anthropic which is backed by both Amazon and Google-parent Alphabet. The lawsuit was filed against Anthropic last year by best-selling mystery thriller writer Andrea Bartz, whose novels include We Were Never Here, along with The Good Nurse author Charles Graeber and The Feather Thief author Kirk Wallace Johnson. They accused the company of stealing their work to train its Claude AI chatbot in order to build a multi-billion dollar business. The company holds more than seven million pirated books in a central library, according to Judge Alsup’s June decision, and faced up to $150,000 in damages per copyrighted work. His ruling was among the first to weigh in on how Large Language Models (LLMs) can legitimately learn from existing material. It found that Anthropic’s use of the authors’ books was “exceedingly transformative” and therefore allowed under US law. But he rejected Anthropic’s request to dismiss the case. Anthropic was set to stand trial in December over its use of pirated copies to build its library of material. Plaintiffs lawyers called the settlement announced Friday “the first of its kind in the AI era.” “It will provide meaningful compensation for each class work and sets a precedent requiring AI companies to pay copyright owners,” said lawyer Justin Nelson representing the authors. “This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong.” Questions about the intersection of AI development and copyright law are increasingly landing in the courts. “You need that fresh training data from human beings,” said Alex Yang, Professor of Management Science and Operations at London Business School. “If you want to grant more copyright to AI-created content, you must also strengthen mechanisms that compensate humans for their original contributions.”
Harry’s tea with Charles could be small but significant step to reconciliation
rince Harry has met his father King Charles at Clarence House in London on Wednesday for their first face to face meeting since February 2024. The clues have been scattered all over the place in recent months. In his BBC interview in May, there was a distinct shift in tone from the prince. After the years of raw, emotional media appearances, the Netflix documentary series, the searing criticism of the royal family in his memoir Spare, this was a different Prince Harry in front of the cameras. “I would love a reconciliation with my family,” he said. “There’s no point in continuing to fight anymore. Life is precious.” Prince Harry had made his position clear. He wanted to see his father but was the King feeling the same way? A photograph in the Mail on Sunday in July showed the media communications team representing Prince Harry meeting in London with the King’s communications director. Two rival camps coming together and the image finding its way onto the front page of a national newspaper. Both sides denied leaking the photo but what it did was show there was a dialogue. A channel of communication between both camps had opened. And there has been a unified silence from both sides in recent days that has also been telling. Neither side would be drawn on a date or time of any reunion. We were making educated guesses on when father and son might meet based on gaps in their diaries and who was planning to be where geographically. In a family fallout riddled with mistrust and rancour, the two camps stayed very tight lipped about the possibility of a meeting. Their mutual silence held.
Wake Up Dead Man review: The ‘funniest and most playful’ Knives Out mystery yet
Daniel Craig returns as Benoit Blanc and Josh O’Connor nearly steals the show in the “darkest” but also “most playful” instalment of the Knives Out franchise so far. Can anyone steal a Knives Out film from the great detective Benoit Blanc? As it turns out, yes, almost. The biggest revelation of Wake Up Dead Man, the third in Rian Johnson’s series of deliciously entertaining mysteries, is that Josh O’Connor, so great at drama, is also an excellent comic. He plays Father Jud Duplenticy, a former boxer turned priest, who as punishment for a violent outburst is sent from upstate New York to a tiny parish in the village of Chimney Rock. It’s a setting that looks as if it has been transported from a screen adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel, with a small neo-Gothic church and adjacent graveyard. It’s exactly the kind of place where too many murders take place. But instead of meeting some kindly vicar, Jud goes to work for Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, played by Josh Brolin as a wild-haired, fiery cynic. It’s not quite fair to say that O’Connor steals the film from Daniel Craig’s Blanc. Craig is a scene-stealer himself With its Gothic atmosphere and deeper themes, Wake Up Dead Man has a darker tone than the previous Knives Out films. Yet it is also the funniest and most playful so far. Along with the usual murder(s) and large glittery cast, it has religion, and a touch of meta in its literary allusions and film references. Johnson has acknowledged wanting to go back to the roots of mystery stories with this installment, citing Edgar Allan Poe, so it’s good to keep in mind Poe’s themes of men haunted by guilt and of creepy burials. But with more assurance than ever, he walks a perfectly balanced line as he borrows old tropes and adapts them. There is plenty of irreverent dialogue here, and rude graffiti on a mausoleum. It’s not quite fair to say that O’Connor steals the film from Daniel Craig’s Blanc. Craig is a scene-stealer himself. Blanc turns up to solve a murder in Chimney Rock with his southern accent and confident swagger, looking more dapper than ever. But it seems that with each Knives Out film he has fewer scenes, and at times he is like an orchestra conductor weaving us through the various characters and possibilities in the ever-twisting plot. Blanc even enlists Jud’s help in solving the murder. There’s no question that Father Jud is the film’s throughline, and O’Connor swerves gracefully from comic to serious. Johnson begins by playing with point of view. We get Jud’s account, requested by Blanc, of the events leading to what Jud calls the Good Friday murder. Using a device he acknowledges is borrowed from mystery novels, he introduces Blanc and us to the congregants, most of them with a cultish devotion to Wicks.
Everything Apple announced at its big event: iPhone Air, iPhone 17, new Apple Watches and more
New York — Apple announced the first major redesign of the iPhone in years on Tuesday when it confirmed the launch of a new, thinner model called the iPhone Air. CEO Tim Cook called it the “biggest leap ever for iPhone.” That was one of a number of product upgrades that came during Apple’s annual hardware event at its Cupertino, California, headquarters, which also included improvements to the Apple Watch and AirPods Pro. The iPhone maker had teased the event with the phrase “awe dropping” — a nod to the fact that the pressure for Apple to impress with its latest devices was especially high this year. iPhone sales have been bumpy for years, Apple has fallen behind competitors on artificial intelligence and the company has been caught in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump’s trade wars. During Tuesday’s event, Apple seemed to double down on its hardware leadership, noting how its new devices could enable AI features without making its “Apple Intelligence” the star of the show. And analysts were impressed. “Apple’s iPhone 17 Air was the headline announcement, reflecting the company’s push to prove it can still differentiate through design,” Emarketer analyst Gadjo Sevilla said in emailed commentary following the event. “It’s a reminder that Apple’s competitive advantage remains rooted in product experience rather than raw AI as a product.” With the new iPhone lineup, “there is an iPhone for everybody at a reasonable price,” tech analyst and PP Foresight founder Paolo Pescatore said in an email. Still, Apple shares (AAPL) were down around 1.5% following the event, bringing the stock down nearly 4% since the start of this year and suggesting that even a new model may not be enough to wow shareholders. That could be because some of the new releases and features Apple announced on Tuesday are trailing similar offerings previously released by rivals. For example, the iPhone Air will compete with Samsung’s thin Galaxy S25 Edge model, which was announced in May.
Elon Musk is on the cusp of losing his title as world’s richest person
Elon Musk is on the verge of losing his “world’s richest person” title to Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison. Ellison’s wealth jumped $70 billion to $364 billion after Oracle’s stunningly strong earnings report Tuesday evening, putting him in striking distance of Musk’s net worth of $384 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Oracle (ORCL) reported surging demand for its data center capacity from AI customers, launching the stock into the stratosphere. It’s rocketing 33% higher in premarket trading Wednesday. CEO Safra Catz announced Tuesday after the stock market closed that Oracle signed four multibillion-dollar contracts with customers during the quarter, and she expects to sign several more in the coming months. As Oracle has become a powerhouse in AI technology, it has ridden the recent tech boom that has propelled Nvidia to become the world’s most valuable company, with a valuation north of $4 trillion. Microsoft briefly joined Nvidia above the $4 trillion mark. The eight most-valuable stocks in the S&P 500 are all tech stocks with some stake in building the AI-powerd future. As the AI boom accelerates, Oracle’s stock has risen 45% this year. Musk first captured the title in 2021 and has largely held on to it for the past few years thanks in part to his various investments in Tesla and SpaceX. Over the years, Musk has briefly lost it twice, first in 2021 to LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault and in 2024 to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Nevertheless, Musk has prevailed despite his various trials and tribulations. He was even give a new pay package that could be worth close to $1 trillion once Tesla hits certain milestones. For Ellison, his road to becoming the world’s richest person traces back to 1977, when he dropped out of college and helped establish Oracle.