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Anthropic owes authors $1.5B for pirating work — but the claims process is a Kafkaesque mess

Earlier this year, the author Maureen Johnson was fighting with Anthropic. Specifically, she was wrestling with the Anthropic copyright settlement website. Johnson is the author of 28 books, most of them YA and many of them bestsellers. The AI company Anthropic owes her an estimated $3,000 per book (to be split 50-50 with her publisher) for several of them. The payouts are part of a first-of-its-kind settlement that was handed down last fall, in which Anthropic admitted that it downloaded millions of pirated, copyrighted books to train its AI models without authors’ permission. (Ac...