Judge Approves $1.5 Billion Settlement in Anthropic Copyright Case

A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement between artificial intelligence company Anthropic and thousands of authors whose works were used to train the Claude chatbot. The settlement, approved by District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, will provide authors with approximately $3,000 per book.

In a ruling on Monday, Judge Martínez-Olguín stated that the class-action settlement offers "meaningful relief" to the affected authors and publishers. Approximately 91% of the more than 482,000 books included in the settlement have been claimed by their authors or publishers, who are now eligible for payment.

"This is the largest known copyright recovery in history," said plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson in a statement. "We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible."

The case was initially brought in 2024 by bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz along with two other authors. U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who has since retired, had issued a preliminary approval of the settlement in San Francisco federal court last September. Alsup had previously ruled that while training AI chatbots on copyrighted books was not illegal, Anthropic had improperly acquired millions of books through pirate websites.