Anthropic Wins Approval for $1.5B Copyright Settlement

A U.S. federal judge has approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors who accused the AI company of misusing copyrighted books to train its Claude chatbot.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin approved the settlement on Monday in San Francisco. It is the largest known settlement in a U.S. copyright case.

The case is one of dozens filed by authors, publishers and news organisations against technology companies over AI training data. It is also the first major U.S. copyright case involving AI training to settle.

The authors sued Anthropic in 2024. They alleged that the company used pirated copies of their books without permission to train Claude.

Anthropic, which counts Amazon and Alphabet among its backers, agreed to the settlement in 2025. The deal followed an earlier ruling by now-retired Judge William Alsup.

Alsup ruled that training AI models on copyrighted books could qualify as fair use under U.S. copyright law. However, he also found that Anthropic had illegally stored more than seven million pirated books.

The books were kept in a central digital library. The court found that Anthropic did not need to store all of them for AI training.

That finding exposed Anthropic to a potential trial. Damages could have reached hundreds of billions of dollars.

Instead, the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve the authors’ claims. The settlement will pay about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 works covered by the agreement.

Some authors objected to the deal. They argued that the payout was too small and that the lawyers’ fees were excessive.

Judge Martinez-Olguin rejected those objections. She said the criticism did not reflect the risks and costs of taking the case to trial.

The court awarded the authors’ lawyers more than $101 million in fees. That amount was below the $187.5 million they had requested.

“We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court’s landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law — which remains the law today,” said Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic’s deputy general counsel.

“We are pleased that more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment,” she added.

Justin Nelson, the lead lawyer for the authors, called the agreement a “historic settlement” and the largest known copyright recovery.

The settlement closes the case but does not settle the wider legal debate over AI training. Alsup’s fair-use ruling came from a single district court and did not create binding precedent across the United States.

Meanwhile, other copyright cases against AI companies remain active. Authors and publishers have sued companies including Google, Meta, Midjourney and OpenAI over the use of copyrighted material to train AI systems.

Some authors and publishers also opted out of Anthropic’s settlement. Their separate lawsuits against the company are still ongoing.