A federal judge on Monday skewered a $1.5 billion settlement between artificial intelligence company Anthropic and authors who allege nearly half million books had been illegally pirated to train chatbots, raising the specter that the case could still end up going to trial.

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.

A group of book authors has reached a settlement with AI company Anthropic after suing for copyright infringement.

A barrage of high-profile lawsuits in a New York federal court will test the future of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence products that wouldn’t be so eloquent had they not ingested huge troves of copyrighted human works.