Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement related to an AI copyright lawsuit has been approved by a federal judge in San Francisco. The settlement stems from a 2024 lawsuit filed by a group of writers who accused the company of using pirated copies of their work to train its Claude large language models.
Judge William Alsup, who initially oversaw the case, concluded that while Anthropic’s training of Claude with the writers’ works constituted fair use, the company infringed on their copyright by storing 7 million pirated books in a central library. In September 2022, Alsup rejected an earlier settlement agreement over concerns about its terms, describing it as “shoving the terms down the throat of authors” and stating it was “nowhere close to complete.”
Following the rejection, Anthropic established an official settlement website to list affected works, allowing authors to verify their eligibility for claims. The revised settlement covers more than 480,000 works.
After Judge Alsup’s retirement, US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin approved the revised settlement terms. Under the settlement, authors can expect to receive approximately $3,000 per affected work, and Anthropic is obligated to destroy the pirated copies of the authors’ books.
Some plaintiffs consider the payout insufficient and have chosen to opt out of the settlement to pursue individual lawsuits against Anthropic.
