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A federal judge has approved Anthropic’s record $1.5 billion settlement for an AI copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors who claimed the company trained its AI models on pirated copies of their copyrighted works.
Anthropic proposed the settlement in September, and US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin approved it on Monday, Reuters reports.
The settlement is the largest for a copyright lawsuit in US history. It covers nearly 500,000 copyrighted works, so the payout for each could be around $3,000.
Anthropic had set up a website for the settlement procedure, and the deadline to submit a claim expired on March 30. Around 91% of the authors had claimed their part of the settlement before the deadline, “and we're looking forward to bringing this matter to a close,” Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, Aparna Sridhar, told Reuters.
The lawsuit began with three authors in 2024 and gained significant attention last year after Judge William Alsup ruled that the fair use doctrine permits AI companies to train models on books they obtain legally. Anthropic was eventually held liable only for allegedly downloading and retaining pirated copies of copyrighted works.
Alsup has now retired, and so the settlement was approved by Martinez-Olguin. The authors’ lead attorney, Justin Nelson, welcomed the final approval. “It is the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible,” Nelson said in a statement.
Several other tech giants, including Apple and OpenAI, are facing similar AI copyright lawsuits.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
