A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday approved artificial intelligence company Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit filed by a group of authors who alleged the company improperly used their books to train its AI chatbot, Claude.
Under the settlement, Anthropic will pay eligible authors approximately $3,000 per book, making it one of the largest payouts ever in a U.S. copyright class action.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted final approval to the agreement, making it the largest known settlement in a U.S. copyright case, while rejecting objections that the compensation amount was insufficient.
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 approved the deal last September.
Anthropic, Authors Welcome Resolution
“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.
“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.”
The authors’ lead attorney, Justin Nelson, welcomed what he called a “historic settlement.”
“It is the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible,” Nelson said in a statement, referring to payments to authors covered by the settlement.
Legal Battle Continues
The writers sued Anthropic in 2024, alleging the Amazon- and Alphabet-backed AI company used pirated copies of copyrighted books obtained from so-called “shadow libraries” without permission to train Claude. The lawsuits argued that the company had built its AI models using unlawfully acquired works, sparking one of the first major copyright battles over generative AI.
Last June, Judge Alsup ruled that training AI models on books qualified as fair use under U.S. copyright law, but found Anthropic violated copyright law by storing more than 7 million pirated books in a central, accessible library that was not necessarily used for AI training, making that conduct infringing.
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.
The settlement spurred objections from some authors who argued it was not large enough, overcompensated the plaintiffs’ attorneys or wrongly excluded some copyright owners.
Judge Martinez-Olguin overruled those objections in her ruling on Monday. The judge said that complaints about the settlement’s size were “not grounded in a realistic assessment of the overall risks and rewards of a trial,” and awarded the attorneys more than $101 million of the $187.5 million they requested in fees.
Some authors and publishers opted out of the settlement and have filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic that are still ongoing.
(With inputs from Reuters)
