Anthropic settles with authors and publishers for $1.5 billion in landmark copyright case
A federal judge today approved a $1.5 billion settlement awarded to authors and publishers whose works were used by Anthropic PBC to train the AI chatbot, Claude, in what is the largest copyright class action settlement in history.
Judge William Alsup issued a preliminary approval of the settlement last year, though he has since retired, with U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín today calling the settlement fair and adequate.
“The $1.5 billion settlement provides substantial benefits to the class in light of the novel claims asserted,” she wrote. “Success at trial was not assured, and a loss would have left the class with no recourse.”
The payout means authors and publishers will receive $3,000 for each of the roughly 500,000 works that Anthropic copied from pirate libraries while developing its AI chatbot, Claude. The plaintiffs alleged that Anthropic trained its models on hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books obtained from illegal piracy websites such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.
“Anthropic has attempted to steal the fire of Prometheus,” wrote the plaintiffs. “It is no exaggeration to say that Anthropic’s model seeks to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works.”
The company is now required to destroy all the pirated material.
The central issue that has spawned a plethora of lawsuits — whether it is legal to train AI models on copyrighted material — has not yet been definitively resolved. Judge William Alsup sided with Anthropic, ruling that training its AI on copyrighted books constituted fair use. However, he also held that obtaining those books from pirate websites fell outside the protection of fair use and therefore infringed copyright.
Countless lawsuits are still awaiting resolution, with companies including Google LLC, Meta Platforms Inc., Midjourney Inc., Perplexity AI Inc., and OpenAI Group PBC, all hoping for a favorable outcome.
“We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court’s landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law — which remains the law today,” Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement after today’s judgment. “We are pleased that more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment, and we’re looking forward to bringing this matter to a close.”
Photo: Unsplash
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