A US federal judge approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors on Friday, finalizing what is now recognized as the largest known payout in a US copyright case. According to reports from Reuters, Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted final approval and overruled objections from authors who called the sum too small. The settlement resolves a copyright dispute that began in 2024 when authors sued the artificial intelligence company, alleging it used pirated copies of their books to train its Claude chatbot. As reported by The Times of India, 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 US case to settle. The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them. The final judicial sign-off resolves a key dispute that had been advancing through federal court since preliminary approval was granted in September 2025 by former Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup before his retirement. The legal action stems from the landmark case Bartz v. Anthropic, initiated by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson back in 2024.
The case gained significant legal precedent when now-retired Judge William Alsup ruled in June 2024 that training AI on books constituted fair use under copyright law. As reported by Reuters, while Judge Alsup found that training on the books was fair use, he determined that Anthropic had broken the law by storing 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. Judge Martinez-Olguin took over after Alsup retired and signed the final order on Friday, with Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar noting that the settlement was reached after the court's landmark ruling. The ruling was a turning point for the AI industry, but didn't excuse how Anthropic obtained the books in the first place. According to Reuters, Anthropic had built its training library from two sources: books it purchased and scanned (fine), and books it downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Judge Alsup found the second method illegal on its own terms and said that piracy question could go to trial; Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon after to avoid a trial and whatever damages a jury might have awarded.
The settlement provides roughly $3,000 per-work payment for over 480,000 works, according to The Times of India. Judge Martinez-Olguin noted that this sum is four times the $750 minimum for standard copyright infringement. As of April, claimants covered 440,490 works, representing 91.3% of the total list. The deal also requires Anthropic to destroy the pirated book files, with the judge rejecting objections that the $1.5 billion figure was too low, stating the complaints were 'Not grounded in a realistic assessment of the overall risks and rewards of a trial.' Under the approved terms, the AI developer will fund $1.5 billion into a payout pool to compensate copyright holders, with rightsholders with registered works set to receive approximately $3,000 per eligible book. The terms require Anthropic to destroy all original files and duplicates acquired from known pirated book repositories, including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The deal resolves past downloading claims without serving as an ongoing license, with rightsholders preserving their right to bring separate legal actions regarding future training practices, unlisted literary works, or potential infringements arising directly from output responses generated by Claude. According to The New York Post, authors and other copyright holders filed claims covering over 92% of the more than 480,000 works included in the settlement. The settlement spurred objections from some authors who argued it was not large enough, overcompensated the plaintiffs' attorneys or wrongly excluded some copyright owners.
In a significant development, Judge Martinez-Olguin sharply cut class counsel's requested fee award from $187.5 million to $101.6 million, as reported by Reuters. The judge called the deal the largest copyright class action settlement in history, emphasizing the unprecedented scale of the payout. The authors' lead attorney, Justin Nelson, welcomed what he called a "historic settlement," stating 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. While the settlement resolves the majority of claims, many authors and creators still don't view it as a win because of how the legal question was resolved. As reported by The New York Post, while Alsup's ruling was a single district court decision, it remains influential as Anthropic's decision to settle means the case will never reach an appeals court to become binding precedent. Other judges are still free to reach their own conclusions on their own facts, which is exactly what's playing out elsewhere. There is still a string of copyright lawsuits against companies such as Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI over whether it's legal to train AI models on copyrighted works. Just last week, a group of publishers and authors, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a class action lawsuit against Google over accusations that the company used their copyrighted works to train its AI platform, Gemini. The deal resolves past downloading claims without serving as an ongoing license, with rightsholders preserving their right to bring separate legal actions regarding future training practices, unlisted literary works, or potential infringements arising directly from output responses generated by Claude. Some authors and publishers opted out of the settlement and have filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic that are still ongoing.
