NEW YORK (AP) — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.

The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement.

The company has agreed to pay authors or publishers about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.

“As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors. “It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”

A trio of authors — thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic downloaded to train its chatbot Claude.

A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.

If Anthropic had not settled, experts say losing the case after a scheduled December trial could have cost the San Francisco-based company even more money.

“We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business,” said William Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco has scheduled a Monday hearing to review the settlement terms.

Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the settlement, if approved, “will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.”

“We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” said Aparna Sridhar, the company’s deputy general counsel.

As part of the settlement, the company has also agreed to destroy the original book files it downloaded.

Books are known to be important sources of data — in essence, billions of words carefully strung together — that are needed to build the AI large language models behind chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and its chief rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Alsup’s June ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million digitized books that it “knew had been pirated.” It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of OpenAI to match the vast collections on which ChatGPT was trained.

Debut thriller novel “The Lost Night” by Bartz, a lead plaintiff in the case, was among those found in the dataset.

The settlement could influence other disputes, including an ongoing lawsuit by authors and newspapers against OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft, and cases against Metaand Midjourney. And just as the Anthropic settlement terms were filed, another group of authors sued Apple on Friday in the same San Francisco federal court.

“This indicates that maybe for other cases, it’s possible for creators and AI companies to reach settlements without having to essentially go for broke in court,” said Long, the legal analyst.

The industry, including Anthropic, had largely praised Alsup’s June ruling because he found that training AI systems on copyrighted works so chatbots can produce their own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative.”

Comparing the AI model to “any reader aspiring to be a writer,” Alsup wrote that Anthropic “trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different.”

But documents disclosed in court showed Anthropic employees’ internal concerns about the legality of their use of pirate sites. The company later shifted its approach and hired Tom Turvey, the former Google executive in charge of Google Books, a searchable library of digitized books that successfully weathered years of copyright battles.

With his help, Anthropic began buying books in bulk, tearing off the bindings and scanning each page before feeding the digitized versions into its AI model, according to court documents. That was legal but didn’t undo the earlier piracy, according to the judge.

The College of Charleston confirmed on Friday that one of its instructors was among the 16 people killed in the crash of the popular funicular railway in Lisbon on Wednesday, which shocked Portugal and led to pointed questions about the cause of the accident.

Heather Hall, a member of the faculty of the Department of Teacher Education, was the only American killed in the accident, which also injured 21. Among the dead were five Portuguese citizens, two South Koreans, one Swiss, three British citizens, two Canadians, one French and one Ukrainian, according to the Portuguese police.

Hall had been in Lisbon to speak at a conference, Fran Welch, the dean of the School of Education, said in a statement.

“This is a tragic loss for all of us,” Welch said. “As an alumna of the College (‘97) and a dynamic instructor with a specialization is special education, she shared her love of travel with her students.”

The statement noted that Hall had been a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana and had taken her students on study abroad trips to Italy.

Welch added, “Her energy, kindness and student-centeredness will be deeply missed.”

Hall’s passion for travel is highlighted on her Facebook page which shows photos of her in Havana, Venice and at the Colosseum in Rome.

The wreckage of the funicular, known as the Elevador da Glória, was cleared overnight and put in police custody.

Alexandre Rodrigues, the commander of the Lisbon fire brigade, told reporters Wednesday that authorities were alerted about the derailment at 6:01 p.m. local time (12:01 p.m. ET) and arrived within three minutes. The funicular derailed and crashed into a building, he said.

Becky Britton, of Minnesota, was vacationing in the city with her husband when she walked past the scene and saw what she described as carnage.

“I feel sad, and when you’re here it’s real. If it happened to us, our families, we would have been notified and that’s just devastating,” she said.

Emergency officials said all victims were pulled out of the wreckage in just over two hours.

Classified as a national monument, the Elevador da Glória funicular connected Restauradores Square to the Jardim de São Pedro de Alcântara, a popular garden in the Bairro Alto neighborhood.

The service, which was inaugurated in 1885, goes up and down a few hundred yards of a hill on a curved, traffic-free road in tandem with one going the opposite way. It is a popular attraction with Lisbon’s tourists, and long lines of people typically form for the brief rides.

Harnessed by steel cables, it can carry more than 40 people, seated and standing, and it is also commonly used by Lisbon residents.

The government’s Office for Air and Rail Accident Investigations is expected to release a preliminary technical report on the accident on Saturday.

The 2025 NFL season is here, and Brazil is the host of a clash between AFC West heavyweights Friday night: the three-time defending conference champion Kansas City Chiefs and 2024 wild card Los Angeles Chargers.

There’s plenty of fun matchups all over the field. Los Angeles returns much of its defensive core that comprised the NFL’s No. 1 scoring defense for the first of two showdowns with the Chiefs’ dynamic future Hall of Fame duo of quarterback Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce. Kansas City will counter Chargers Pro Bowl quarterback Justin Herbert, fresh off a career year in 2024, with the league’s No. 4 scoring defense (19.2 points per game allowed) from a year ago.

It’s also a near guarantee Friday night’s showdown will go down to the wire even though the Chiefs have won the past seven matchups. Six of those meetings were one-score games.

Will the Chiefs, whose 17-game winning streak in one-score games including the playoffs is the longest in NFL history, escape with another narrow victory over their division rivals? Or will the ball finally bounce the Chargers’ way under the lights in Sao Paulo? 

Keep it locked here as CBS Sports provides you with live updates, highlights and analysis as the Chiefs battle the Chargers in Week 1. 

Where to watch Chiefs vs. Chargers

• Date: Friday, Sept. 5 | Time: 8 p.m. ET
• Location: Corinthians Arena (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
• Stream: YouTube
• Follow: CBS Sports App
• Odds: Chiefs -3; O/U 47.5 (via FanDuel Sportsbook)