Anthropic AI copyright lawsuit: Update as judge approves massive settlement and payout for authors

Anthropic will finally have to pay authors for pirating their books.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved a $1.5 billion AI copyright settlement. The payout is believed to be the largest ever for a U.S. copyright suit. 

Companies like Facebook parent Meta Platforms and ChatGPT maker OpenAI have also faced copyright lawsuits from authors.

What does the Anthropic settlement say?

Each member of the class action lawsuit could receive between $200 and $150,000 per work, according to the decision. However, it estimates that the per-work payment will be about $3,000. 

The payout stems from a 2024 copyright infringement lawsuit filed by a group of authors led by Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson.

It claimed that Anthropic had committed “large-scale theft” in choosing to use pirated copies of books to train its chatbot, Claude. 

In June 2025, Judge William Alsup—now retired—ruled that AI could be trained on copyrighted books, but that Anthropic had accessed these books illegally, taking bootleg copies from online libraries. 

The case was set to go to trial in December and could have led to hundreds of billions of dollars in damages owed by Anthropic. Instead, the company chose to settle in September for $1.5 billion. 

Almost a year later, Judge Martínez-Olguín has taken over for Judge Alsup and approved the settlement. 

Fast Company reached out to Anthropic for comment.

Monday was a busy day for Judge Martínez-Olguín, as she also granted the temporary halt of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger. California led a 12-state coalition that argued the merger will violate antitrust law.