Misinterpreted (Score 1)

From this link, the U.S. electrical energy use for the month of April was 290.7 terawatthours, which corresponds to an average current of over 3 billion amps (U.S. alone). That is much higher than the Atlas current. As other posters pointed out, they must be talking about power. From the press release:

Scientists today successfully generated a powerful current - roughly four times the electrical power on Earth - to create....

So they never actually said the current itself was equal to four times the electrical power of the Earth, but implied the power generated from the current was that size.

But, as you can see here, they were generating the same current level over 4 years ago, so this is hardly a new result.