A federal judge in San Francisco has officially approved a $1.5 billion settlement between artificial intelligence company Anthropic and a class of authors who accused the company of improperly using their books to develop its AI chatbot, Claude.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin announced she would grant final approval of the agreement, which stands as the largest known settlement ever reached in a U.S. copyright case.
The lawsuit is one of many filed by copyright holders — including authors and news organizations — against technology companies over the use of written works to train large language model AI systems. It is the first major American case of this type to reach a settlement.
Now-retired Judge William Alsup had initially approved the deal back in September of last year.
The authors originally filed suit against Anthropic in 2024, alleging the company — which counts Amazon and Alphabet among its backers — used pirated copies of their books without authorization to teach Claude how to respond to users.
Alsup ruled last June that Anthropic had made fair use of the authors’ works for AI training purposes. However, he also found that the company had violated the authors’ rights by storing more than 7 million pirated books in a “central library” that wasn’t necessarily tied to AI training. A trial had been set for last December to determine the financial damages Anthropic owed, with potential liability reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
An attorney representing the authors told the court during a hearing that copyright claims were filed covering more than 92% of the over 480,000 works included in the settlement. Still, the agreement has drawn criticism from some authors who feel the payout is too small, that the plaintiffs’ lawyers are being overcompensated, or that certain copyright owners were improperly left out.
A number of authors and publishers chose not to participate in the settlement and have pursued their own separate lawsuits against Anthropic, which remain active.
