US Judge Approves Anthropic’s $1.5B Copyright Settlement With Authors

A federal judge in San Francisco has approved artificial intelligence company Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit brought by authors who accused the company of using their books without permission to train its AI chatbot Claude.

US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted final approval to the settlement on Monday, making it the largest known settlement in a US copyright case. The judge rejected objections that the payout was insufficient.

The case is among dozens of lawsuits filed by copyright owners, including authors and news organisations, against technology companies over the use of copyrighted material to train large language models. It is the first major US AI copyright case to reach a settlement.

The settlement was initially approved last September by now-retired Judge William Alsup.

Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said the company reached the agreement in 2025 after the court’s “landmark ruling” that training AI systems on books could qualify as fair use under copyright law.

“We are pleased that more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment, and we are looking forward to bringing this matter to a close,” Sridhar said in a statement.

The authors’ lead lawyer, Justin Nelson, described the agreement as a “historic settlement”, saying it represented the largest known copyright recovery in history.

“We look forward to making distributions to the class as promptly as possible,” Nelson said, referring to payments to authors covered by the settlement.

The lawsuit was filed in 2024 by writers who alleged that Anthropic, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet Inc., used pirated copies of books without authorisation to train Claude to respond to user prompts.

Judge Alsup ruled last June that Anthropic’s use of books for AI training was protected as fair use under copyright law. However, he found that the company had infringed authors’ rights by storing more than seven million pirated books in a “central library”, even though those copies were not necessarily used for AI training.

A trial had been scheduled to determine potential damages for the alleged piracy, with claims potentially reaching hundreds of billions of dollars.

The settlement faced objections from some authors who argued that the amount was inadequate, that it provided excessive compensation to lawyers, or that it unfairly excluded certain copyright owners.

Judge Martínez-Olguín dismissed those objections, ruling that concerns over the settlement amount were not based on a realistic assessment of the risks and benefits of going to trial. She awarded the lawyers more than $101 million in fees, below the $187.5 million they had sought.

Some authors and publishers opted out of the settlement and have filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic, which remain pending.

 
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