US judge approves Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement

A US federal judge has approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers whose books were obtained from online piracy databases, according to court documents.

US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin approved the agreement Monday, rejecting objections from some authors who argued that the compensation was too low.

The case was filed in 2024 by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of using unauthorized copies of books while developing its Claude artificial intelligence models.

The settlement covers 500,000 works, with $3,000 allocated for each title before legal fees and other costs. Payments may be shared between authors, publishers and other copyright holders.

Anthropic said claims had been filed for more than 91% of the eligible works.

In June 2025, then-presiding Judge William Alsup ruled that training AI models on books could qualify as fair use. But he found that Anthropic’s storage of millions of books downloaded from piracy websites was not protected under that principle.

That ruling exposed the company to damages of up to $150,000 for each willfully infringed work if the case proceeded to trial.

Anthropic welcomed the settlement, while the plaintiffs’ attorney Justin Nelson described it as the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history.

The case is the first major settlement among a wave of US lawsuits against AI companies, including OpenAI, Meta and Google, for their use of copyrighted material.