A federal judge granted final approval Monday to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with a group of authors and publishers who accused the AI company of using pirated books to train its Claude chatbot, closing the largest known copyright recovery in U.S. legal history.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on the deal, rejecting objections from some class members who argued the settlement was too small. “Not grounded in a realistic assessment of the overall risks and rewards of a trial,” Martinez-Olguin wrote of those complaints. She awarded the plaintiffs’ attorneys more than $101 million of the $187.5 million they had requested in fees.
The settlement covers more than 480,000 books, with authors and publishers who filed claims set to receive approximately $3,000 per affected work. As of the court hearing, claims had been filed covering more than 91% of the eligible works. Anthropic is also required to destroy the pirated copies of the books it holds under the terms of the deal.
The case traces to a 2024 lawsuit in which authors accused Anthropic of downloading pirated books from shadow libraries to train Claude. Then-U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled last June that training an AI model on copyrighted books constituted fair use under U.S. law, a decision that remains in effect. But Alsup separately found that Anthropic violated the authors’ rights by retaining more than 7 million pirated books in a central digital library, exposing the company to statutory damages regardless of the fair-use ruling on training itself. A trial to determine those damages, with potential exposure running into the hundreds of billions of dollars, had been scheduled for last December before the settlement was reached.
Alsup considered an earlier version of the settlement before granting preliminary approval last September; the exact sequence of that earlier review has been described inconsistently across news accounts. He has since retired, and Martinez-Olguin took over the case, granting final approval to the settlement Monday.
Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said the settlement followed the court’s “landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use,” a standard she said remains the law today.
“The largest known copyright recovery in history.” – Justin Nelson, plaintiffs’ attorney
Some authors and publishers opted out of the settlement and are pursuing separate copyright claims against Anthropic that remain ongoing. The case is the first major U.S. AI copyright lawsuit to reach a settled resolution, among dozens of similar suits filed by authors, publishers and news organizations against AI companies over the use of copyrighted material in model training.
