A federal judge has approved a significant $1.5 billion copyright settlement, mandating that artificial intelligence company Anthropic compensate thousands of authors whose pirated works were used to train its Claude chatbot.
District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, in a Monday ruling, described the class-action agreement as providing “meaningful relief” to the affected writers and publishers.
The settlement stipulates payments of approximately $3,000 per book.
A substantial 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling have already been claimed by their creators or publishers, who are now awaiting payment.
Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson hailed the agreement as “the largest known copyright recovery in history,” adding, “We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible.”
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.
The agreement also requires Anthropic to destroy all original and duplicate files obtained from known pirated book repositories, such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.
Despite the settlement, authors retain the right to pursue legal action over future AI training or generated outputs.
The preliminary approval for this settlement was initially granted last September by U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco federal court, prior to his retirement.
Judge Alsup had previously issued a mixed ruling last summer, determining that while training AI chatbots on copyrighted material was not inherently illegal, Anthropic had wrongfully obtained millions of books through pirate websites.
Alsup required a “drop-dead list” of the total books that were pirated, stating his main concern centered on how the claims process will be handled in an effort to ensure everyone eligible knows about it so the authors don’t “get the shaft.”
The lawsuit was originally filed by bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz, award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Charles Graeber, and author, screenwriter Kirk Wallace.
Some authors and publishers opted out of the settlement and have filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic that are still ongoing.
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