A federal judge has given the green light to a $1.5 billion copyright settlement involving artificial intelligence company Anthropic, which used pirated copies of books to train its Claude chatbot — and will now pay thousands of authors approximately $3,000 per book.
District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued the final approval Monday, stating that the class-action settlement delivers “meaningful relief” to the authors and publishers who were affected.
Of the more than 482,000 books covered under the ruling, roughly 91% have been claimed by their respective authors or publishers, who are now in line to receive compensation.
Attorney Justin Nelson, who represented the plaintiffs, issued a statement calling the outcome “the largest known copyright recovery in history,” adding, “We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible.”
The case received preliminary approval last September from U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco federal court. Alsup, who has since retired, previously issued a mixed ruling in the case, determining that while using copyrighted books to train AI systems was not itself illegal, Anthropic had wrongfully obtained millions of books through piracy websites.
Bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz originally filed the lawsuit in 2024 alongside two other authors, setting the legal challenge in motion.
