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A federal judge has greenlit a $1.5 billion copyright settlement requiring artificial intelligence company Anthropic to compensate thousands of authors about $3,000 per book, following the unauthorized use of pirated works to train its Claude chatbot.
District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ordered in a Monday ruling that the class-action settlement delivers "meaningful relief" to impacted authors and publishers.
Roughly 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered under the ruling have been claimed by authors or publishers who are now entitled to payment.
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Lead plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson stated that the settlement represented "the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible."
U.S. District Judge William Alsup granted preliminary approval at San Francisco federal court last September before subsequently retiring. Alsup had previously issued a mixed ruling in the case, determining that training AI chatbots on copyrighted material was not unlawful, but that Anthropic had wrongfully obtained millions of books through pirate websites.
Bestselling thriller author Andrea Bartz originally filed the lawsuit alongside two fellow authors back in 2024.
Had Anthropic not agreed to the settlement, legal experts told the Associated Press that the company was likely looking at even more in damages.
"We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business," William Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer, said.
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Books are important sources of data to AI because they represent billions of words carefully strung together that are needed to build large language models behind chatbots like Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Alsup's ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than seven million digital books that it "knew had been pirated." It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of Anthropic to match the vast collections on which Claud was trained.
The thriller novel "The Lost Night" by Bartz was among those found in the Books3 dataset.
Anthropic later took at least five million copies from the pirate website Library Genesis, or LibGen, and at least two million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror, Alsup wrote.
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