Judge approves a US$1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot

Thriller novelist Andrea Bartz is photographed in her home, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Sept. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge has approved a US$1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors about US$3,000 per book after using pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot.

District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said in a Monday ruling that the class-action settlement provides “meaningful relief” to affected authors and publishers.

About 91 per cent of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling have been claimed by authors or publishers who are now due payment.

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Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement that the settlement was “the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible.”

U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the preliminary approval in San Francisco federal court last September and has since retired. Alsup had dealt the case a mixed ruling last summer, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.

Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, Aparna Sridhar, highlighted that ruling Friday as a landmark showing “that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law.”

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

Bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz first brought the suit with two other authors in 2024. It’s the first major settlement in dozens of AI copyright lawsuits that are still working their way through courts.