By Blake Brittain
July 20 (Reuters) - A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday signed off on artificial intelligence company Anthropic's landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who accused it of misusing their books to train its AI chatbot Claude.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin said that she would grant final approval of the settlement, the largest known settlement of a U.S. copyright case.
The case is one of dozens brought by copyright owners including authors and news outlets against tech companies over the training of their large language models, and the first major U.S. case to settle.
Now-retired Judge William Alsup initially greenlit the deal last September.
The writers sued Anthropic in 2024, arguing that the company, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, used pirated versions of their books without permission to teach Claude to respond to human prompts.
Alsup ruled last June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors' work to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a "central library" that would not necessarily be used for AI training. A trial was scheduled to begin last December to determine how much Anthropic owed for the alleged piracy, with potential damages running into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Authors and other copyright holders filed claims covering over 92% of the more than 480,000 works included in the settlement, an attorney for the authors said during a court hearing. The settlement also spurred objections from some authors who have argued it is not large enough, overcompensates the plaintiffs' attorneys or wrongly excludes some copyright owners.
Some authors and publishers opted out of the settlement and have filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic that are still ongoing.
(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Sanjeev Miglani)