Anthropic reaches $1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors

A U.S. federal judge in San Francisco gave final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement of a class‑action lawsuit brought by a coalition of authors who alleged the AI company used pirated copies of their books to train its Claude chatbot. District Judge Araceli Martinez‑Olguín signed the order, confirming the deal as the largest known copyright payout in U.S. history. The settlement covers roughly 480,000 works, paying about $3,000 per title, and includes attorney fees of more than $101 million. The case, initially filed in 2024, cited Amazon and Alphabet as backers of Anthropic. Earlier, retired Judge William Alsup ruled that using copyrighted text for AI training can qualify as fair use, but he found the company’s practice of storing over 7 million pirated books in a central library to be a separate copyright violation. The settlement avoids a trial that could have resulted in damages running into the hundreds of billions of dollars. While most authors have accepted the payments, some objected to the amount and opted out, proceeding with separate lawsuits.