Anthropic wins approval for $1.5 billion copyright settlement

Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with a group of authors who accused the company of using their books to train its Claude artificial intelligence model has been approved in a class action lawsuit, Reuters reported. US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in San Francisco reportedly approved the deal on July 17, which is said to be the largest copyright settlement in US history.

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Settlement approved

The settlement had first received approval in September last year from now-retired Judge William Alsup. A number of AI chatbot companies have been sued by authors and news organisations over claims that they trained their models on copyrighted material without permission. However, this is the first major AI copyright case in the US to end in a settlement.

Anthropic Deputy General Counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement quoted by Reuters, “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.” She added, “We are pleased that more than 91% 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.”

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Justin Nelson, the lead lawyer for the authors, called it a “historic settlement”. “It is the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the class as promptly as possible,” he said in a statement quoted by Reuters.

In a 2024 lawsuit, authors alleged that Anthropic used pirated copies of their books to train its Claude AI chatbot and maintained a library of more than seven million pirated titles, many of which were allegedly never used for training.

In a landmark ruling last year, US Judge William Alsup found that using copyrighted books to train AI models qualifies as fair use under US copyright law. However, he also ruled that Anthropic may still be held liable for allegedly downloading and retaining millions of pirated books in what the court described as its “central library,” drawing a legal distinction between AI training and the acquisition of copyrighted material.