Judge approves Anthropic's $1.5-billion settlement with authors

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Set us as preferred Anthropic will pay $1.5 billion to authors whose pirated books it used to train its AI in the largest copyright settlement in U.S.history.

Federal Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in Oakland granted final approval of the settlement Monday.The record payout was a modest win for copyright holders, setting a precedent as a wave of AI-related lawsuits works its way through courts.

Although the judge said Anthropic could use authors’ works for training, he backed the payout for acquiring and storing pirated books.More than 500,000 authors and publishers were part of the class-action lawsuit, and they will get paid an estimated $3,000 per eligible work.Their lawyers were awarded $101.6 million in fees.

In 2024, a group of authors sued Anthropic, arguing that the company pirated hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books and used them without permission.U.S.District Judge William Alsup, who initially pronounced his judgment in June last year, offered a partial victory for the authors.

The court found the use of books to train AI was allowed under fair-use norms, but the manner in which Anthropic acquired them — downloading millions of books from pirated libraries without permission — was not.The problem was not that Anthropic had used books to train its model, but rather that it used them without permission or regular payment.

“Two years after we filed, the settlement for our class-action lawsuit got final approval,” Andrea Bartz, best-selling author and one of the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a post on Instagram.“As I’ve been saying from the start, this is an important first step toward accountability for Big AI’s breathtaking theft.” She added: “I’m glad authors and publishers could tell Anthropic the obvious: You can’t steal our stuff!” This lawsuit is one of many filed...