By BARBARA ORTUTAY, Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday approved a $1.5 billion settlement between artificial intelligence company Anthropic and authors who allege nearly half a million books had been illegally pirated to train chatbots.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the approval in San Francisco federal court Thursday after the two sides worked to address his concerns about the settlement, which will pay authors and publishers about $3,000 for each of the books covered by the agreement. It does not apply to future works.

A Monday filing sought to convince the judge that the parties have set up a system designed to get out robust notice to all authors and publishers covered by the agreement, ensuring they get their cut of the pot if they want to sign off on the settlement or opt out to protect their legal rights moving forward.

They also tried to assure him that the author and publishers group that cobbled the deal together are not doing any “back room” dealings that would hurt lesser-known authors.

Alsup’s main concern centered on how the claims process will be handled in an effort to ensure everyone eligible knows about it so the authors don’t “get the shaft.” He had set a September 22 deadline for submitting a claims form for him to review before Thursday’s hearing to review the settlement again.

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The judge had raised worries about two big groups connected to the case — the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers — working “behind the scenes” in ways that could pressure some authors to accept the settlement without fully understanding it.

Attorneys for the authors said in Monday’s filing they believe the settlement will result in a high claims rate, respects existing contracts and is “consistent with due process” and the court’s guidance.

Alsup had 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 to help improve its Claude chatbot.

Bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz, who sued Anthropic with two other authors last year, said in a court declaration ahead of the hearing that she strongly supports the settlement and will work to explain its significance to fellow writers.

“Together, authors and publishers are sending a message to AI companies: You are not above the law, and our intellectual property isn’t yours for the taking,” she wrote.

Alsup also said in the courtroom Thursday that he plans to step down from the bench by the end of the year.

AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this story from Providence, Rhode Island.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that he says will allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States in a way that meets national security concerns laid out by the law.

President Joe Biden signed legislation last year calling for China’s ByteDance to sell TikTok’s assets to an American company by early this year or face a nationwide ban, but Trump has repeatedly signed orders that have allowed TikTok to keep operating in the U.S. as his administration tries to reach an agreement for the sale of the social media company.

Much is still unknown about the actual deal in the works, but Trump said Thursday that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has approved it. Any major change to the popular video platform could have a huge impact on how Americans — particularly young adults and teenagers — consume information online.

The Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to an AP inquiry seeking confirmation that China has signed off on the proposed framework deal.

About 43% of U.S. adults under the age of 30 say they regularly get news from TikTok, higher than any other social media app including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, according to a Pew Research Center report published Thursday.

FILE – The TikTok logo is pictured in Tokyo, Sept. 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, File)

Who will control the new TikTok venture?

Under the terms of the deal that have so far been revealed by the White House, the app will be spun off into a new U.S. joint venture owned by a consortium of American investors — including Oracle and investment firm Silver Lake Partners.

Though the details have yet to be finalized, the investment group’s total stake in the new venture would be around 80%, while ByteDance is expected to have a 20%, or smaller, stake in the entity. The board running the new platform would be controlled by U.S. investors. ByteDance will be represented by one person on the board, but that individual will be excluded from any security matters or related committees.

TikTok’s new owners include many whose business or political interests are tied to Trump, including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch, raising questions about whether political influence will be exerted into the platform.

Although he stepped down as Oracle’s CEO more than a decade ago, Ellison remains heavily involved in its operations, as chairman and chief technology officer. Now 81, he could be in line to become a behind-the-scenes media power player, having already helped finance Skydance’s recently completed $8 billion merger with Paramount, a deal engineered by his son, David.

Trump also mentioned Dell founder Michael Dell will be an investor in the new venture.

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What we know about the algorithm powering the platform

The recommendation algorithm that has steered millions of users into an endless stream of video shorts has been central in the security debate over TikTok. China previously maintained the algorithm must remain under Chinese control by law. But a U.S. regulation that Congress passed with bipartisan support said any divestment of TikTok must mean the platform cut ties with ByteDance.

American officials previously warned the algorithm — which is a complex system of rules and calculations that platforms use to deliver content to your feed — is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape messaging on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect, but no evidence has ever been presented by U.S. officials showing that China has attempted to do so.

Trump, during his first term, signed an executive order attempting to ban the app if it didn’t split off its U.S. business, warning that TikTok’s “data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.”

Trump has since changed his approach to TikTok, often citing its role in helping him reach young voters in the 2024 presidential election.

Although the details remain unclear, a Trump administration official said that a licensed copy of the ByteDance created algorithm — retrained solely with U.S. data — will power the new U.S. version of the app. Administration officials say this retraining effort will nullify any risk of Chinese interference and influence.

Vice President J.D. Vance said “we wanted to keep TikTok operating” but address security concerns so that “Americans can use TikTok but use it with more confidence than they had in the past.”

Young people especially “really wanted this to happen,” Trump said during the signing ceremony.

That makes it unclear if the U.S. version of TikTok will be a different experience than what users in the rest of the world are used to. Any noticeable changes made to a social media platform’s service raises the risk of alienating its audience, said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst for the research firm eMarketer.

In a prime example of how a change of control can reshape a once-popular social media platform, billionaire Elon Musk triggered an almost immediate backlash after he completed his takeover of Twitter nearly three years ago.

But Musk made extremely visible changes, including changing its name to X, pulling back on its content moderation and adding exclusive features for paid subscribers. The changes that gradually occur while different data is fed into the U.S. copy of TikTok’s algorithm could be subtle and unnoticeable to most of its audience.

“Social media is just as much about the culture as it is the technology, and how users will take to new ownership and potentially a new version of the app is still an open question,” Enberg said.

What motivated China to make this deal

Beijing once called the demand that TikTok be spun off from its Chinese parent company an act of “robbery,” but Chinese officials changed their tune as the U.S.-China trade war progressed.

Following the announcement of a possible TikTok framework deal after U.S.-China trade talks in Spain, some observers believed that China was able to extract concessions from the U.S. on loosening trade restrictions in exchange for the TikTok deal. Others believe China was willing to do so to pave the way for a meeting between Xi and Trump.

A TikTok deal would allow China to keep the ball rolling on trade negotiations, said Sun Yun, director of the China program at the Washington-based think tank Stimson Center. “TikTok alone does not compare with the importance of an amicable U.S.-China relations and the positive momentum that prevents many negative development from happening.”

Dimitar Gueorguiev, associate professor of political science at Syracuse University, said TikTok has become an “expendable concession” to Beijing because it is no longer a disruptive newcomer as it was five years ago.

TikTok’s highly personalized “For You” video feed was seen as its secret sauce five years ago, when Trump first threatened to ban the app, but Instagram and other rivals now work similarly.

Gueorguiev argues that Beijing is more interested in retaining access to U.S. technology and services, at least in the short term, so it can build up self-sufficiency in semiconductor, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing.

“That is the front line of technological competition,” Gueorguiev said. “TikTok, by contrast, is a maturing consumer app with diminishing strategic weight.”

The City Council approved the lease of city land to build housing for the formerly incarcerated in the Bronx, over the objections of the local councilmember and City Hall. It’s the first time the Council has overruled one of their own on a land use issue since 2021.

Council Speaker Adrienne Adams ahead of Thursday’s vote not he Just Home plan. )William Alatriste/NYC Council Media Unit)

The City Council approved an application from NYC Health + Hospitals (H+H) to lease land on the campus of Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx, where a nonprofit planned to build 58 units of supportive housing for severely-ill, otherwise-homeless people leaving Rikers Island jails.

Lawmakers voted through the measure Thursday over the objections of the local Councilmember Kristy Marmorato, who opposes the project—a stance that helped her win her seat in 2023. 

It’s a rare example of the Council overruling one of their own on a land use and housing development issue, as lawmakers usually defer to the rep whose district a proposal falls in, a practice known as “member deference.”

After years of planning, the Adams administration pulled its support at the 11th hour, writing to the Committee on Landmarks last week that it was “actively reviewing” the project, which in its current form no longer has the support of City Hall.

On Wednesday night, the eve of the Council meeting, First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro sent a letter to Council Speaker Adrienne Adams urging her not to bring the project to a vote.

“In light of the Mayor’s withdrawal of the application as currently constituted, there would be no purpose to such an authorizing resolution vote and the application should be deemed withdrawn,” wrote Mastro, who added that the city was searching for alternative sites. 

He wrote that they expected the support of the Fortune Society, the nonprofit organization that would build and operate the project.

Stanley Richards, Fortune’s CEO, said that they had not been contacted by the administration about any other locations and were not told about the letter.

“If they have identified another site, it’s not that it should be one or the other. We need both sites, because we see that many people walk through our doors who are struggling with housing insecurity,” said Richards.

Council sources disputed that the mayor has the power to withdraw the application. H+H authorized the disposition of the land in a January 2024 board vote, and Council sources said that it would need to be withdrawn or changed by an action of the H+H board, which may need to restart its process for public engagement.

“Randy Mastro’s letter is indeed irrelevant,” said City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams at a Thursday afternoon press conference. If the administration were to continue to fight the project after the vote, “what the mayor can or cannot do at that point remains to be seen,” she said.

H+H has been silent on whether it wants to advance the Morris Park project or consider a revised plan. The agency did not respond to City Limits’ request for comment on this story before publication.

City Hall criticized the Council for waiting nearly two years to address the application, saying lawmakers are “insisting on going forward with a meaningless vote to approve a limited project on a single site that will never happen because the Mayor no longer supports it,” a spokesperson said in a statement to City Limits

Mastro’s letter said the administration would search for alternative sites for supportive and affordable housing in the Bronx, but those projects would not be designed to support formerly incarcerated people, as Just Home would. Community leaders and H+H have previously said that the need for housing for justice-involved people is high.

City Hall did not provide alternative sites for Just Home in response to City Limits’ questions last week. But in a dig at Councilmember Sandy Nurse, a vocal supporter of the project, Mastro included two proposed sites around Brooklyn’s Broadway Junction in the footnotes of the letter.

Both sites would be in Nurse’s district.

“It was definitely a jab,” Nurse told City Limits. “It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of Randy Mastro and I am certainly not a fan of Mayor Adams.” 

She added that she recently opened a supportive housing site in her district with Housing Plus, an organization that serves justice-involved people.

The proposed site for the “Just Home” project at 1900 Seminole Ave. on the Jacobi Medical Center campus. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

A spokesperson for City Hall said that they were seeking an alternative location for the project with more community support and targeted Nurse’s district specifically for the proposed alternatives because of her support for Just Home.

“It is the right type of facility. It is the right location, and that district is in need of doing its fair share of housing. I think it will be very hypocritical if H+H pulled out of this project, or if their board made a decision to pull this,” said Nurse.

Marmorato’s East Bronx district ranked 38 out of the 51 Council districts for affordable housing production over the last decade, according to a tracker maintained by the New York Housing Conference. Nurse’s district ranked 10th, with 4,080 new affordable apartments built between 2014 and 2024, compared to 484 in Marmorato’s.

City Hall’s continued opposition, however, makes it unclear how the Just Home project can proceed.

It may depend on how much H+H considers itself independent from its boss, Mayor Eric Adams. H+H could dispense the land with or without City Hall’s approval, but Fortune Society likely needs the agency’s support to move the project forward, Richards said.

Marmarato urged her colleagues to vote no on the proposal. 

“If you claim to care about member deference, then you must across the board,” she said at Thursday afternoon’s hearing. “You cannot say one thing publicly and then act differently when personal feelings are at stake. That’s not democracy. It’s hypocrisy.”

But the Council ultimately approved the land disposition 36 to 9. It was the first time the lawmakers overrode “member deference” since 2021, when they approved the NYC Blood Center’s expansion on Manhattan’s East Side over the local rep’s objections.

In November, voters will weigh in on ballot measures from Mayor Adams’ Charter Commission that seek to weaken member deference. Housing advocates and City Hall argue that the practice  results in less new housing during a dire shortage.

Council leadership has downplayed the role of member deference, arguing it helps them secure crucial concessions from developers to serve their neighborhoods. Now they’ve ignored a local member’s objections for the first time during Speaker Adams’ tenure.

Richards is hopeful that the long-delayed Just Home project can now move forward.

He and other criminal justice advocates say access to a stable home is a key public safety measure, and helps ensure those leaving jail don’t re-offend. 

A 2022 analysis by the Corporation for Supportive Housing estimated that some 2,500 people held at Rikers Island in a given year are homeless and have behavioral health needs that would qualify them for supportive housing. 

“We see that many people walk through our doors who are struggling with housing insecurity,” Richards said. “Because what we know is that when people have housing and people have access to services, it increases the likelihood of them not returning back to the system.”

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Patrick@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

The post Council Approves Just Home Project, But City Hall’s Objections Leave Future Unclear appeared first on City Limits.

By FARNOUSH AMIRI and ELLIOT SPAGAT, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — The Trump administration pitched several other countries Thursday on its view that the global system for seeking asylum, in effect since World War II, has been rampantly abused and urged them to join the United States in cracking down on such migration.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau led the discussion on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly alongside representatives from Kosovo, Bangladesh, Liberia and Panama. Landau’s gathering allowed American officials to gauge early support and interest for what could be a massive revamp of the asylum system.

“If you have hundreds of thousands of fake asylum seekers, then what happens to the real asylum system?” Landau said in his opening remarks. “Saying the process is susceptible to abuse is not xenophobic; it is not being a mean or bad person.”

The U.S. said changes must, at a minimum, embrace asylum as a temporary status and dictate that those seeking protection should eventually return home. The Trump administration also emphasized that there is no right to receive asylum in a country of choice and that decisions are governed by individual nations, not multinational organizations.

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Human rights groups watched from the sidelines with unease.

Bill Frelick, Human Rights Watch’s director of refugee and migrant rights, said the U.S. proposal “looks like the first step in a bid to tear down the global refugee system.” He faulted the proposal for not embracing a core principle of the current system that people should not be sent to countries where they face persecution.

Filippo Grandi, the U.N. refugee chief, sat in the audience as the world leaders on the panel applauded the Trump administration’s controversial approach to asylum and migration. Grandi, whose organization advocates for those in forced displacement, used the Q&A portion of the event to plead with Landau to take advantage of organizations like his as the U.S. moves forward with this shift in nearly 80 years of policy.

“The right to seek asylum, which my organization upholds, is not incompatible with sovereignty,” Grandi said to the panel. He added that instead of rushing to halt the global asylum process, “the key is to address the root causes” that force people to flee in the first place.

The U.S. has been the top destination for asylum-seekers by far since 2017, with Germany a distant second, according to 2024 figures from the U.N. refugee agency. President Donald Trump and his allies say people with weak cases have abused the system to gain entry to the United States, obtaining work permits while their cases take years to wind through backlogged immigration courts.

The U.S. adheres to a global asylum system first laid out in the 1951 Refugee Convention and enshrined into U.S. law in 1980.

People seeking refuge in the U.S. are able to apply for asylum once they are on American soil, regardless of whether they came legally. To qualify, they have to show a fear of persecution in their own country because of specific reasons, such as their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. Refugees meet a similar standard by applying abroad.

Once someone is granted asylum, they can’t be deported, they can work legally, bring immediate family, apply for legal residency and eventually seek U.S. citizenship. It offers a permanent future in the U.S.

The panelists Thursday, despite their countries facing varying degrees of migration, appeared to agree that economic migration, in which an individual flees to another country for better financial opportunities, has been conflated with individuals seeking asylum for safety purposes.

Vjosa Osmani Sadriu, the president of Kosovo, talked about her own refugee experience, saying that people like her who are experiencing real dangers and persecution are suffering from loopholes of the asylum system.

“We all came to the conclusion is that it is the illegal migration that must be challenged in order to protect and preserve the integrity of those who are real asylum seekers, of those who are legal citizens and those who respect the rules and respect the law,” she said.

The number of people coming to the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum has ballooned in recent years, overloading immigration courts and leading to cries that the system is being abused by people who are coming for jobs or other reasons that don’t meet the standards for asylum.

Facing mounting criticism over the large numbers of migrants coming to the border, the Biden administration took steps that severely curtailed asylum access.

The first day in office, Trump signed an order declaring an invasion at the southern border and said he was “suspending the physical entry” of migrants and their ability to seek asylum until he decides it is over. Immigration advocates have sued, and the issue is before the courts.

Spagat reported from San Diego. Associated Press writers Matthew Lee in New York and Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.