A federal judge in San Francisco has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors and publishers. The payout, described as the largest copyright recovery in United States history, follows allegations that the company used pirated copies of works to train its Claude chatbot.
Affected authors will receive approximately $3,000 per book. Of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling, about 91 percent have been claimed by authors or publishers. The lawsuit was originally brought in 2024 by bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and two other authors. Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson stated that the settlement provides meaningful relief and is the largest known copyright recovery in history.
District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted final approval on July 20. The case previously saw preliminary approval from Judge William Alsup, who has since retired. Alsup had previously ruled that while training AI chatbots on copyrighted books was not illegal, Anthropic had wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.
While this closes the first major settlement among a wave of copyright lawsuits against AI companies, it does not resolve the broader legal issue of using copyrighted materials to train AI models. Additionally, Anthropic blocked authors from opting out of the settlement at the last minute.