A federal judge approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement
SAN FRANCISCO: A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after using pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot. District Judge Araceli Martinez Olguin said in a ruling on Monday that the class action settlement provides “tangible relief” to aggrieved authors and publishers. About 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling have been claimed by authors or publishers who are now eligible for payment. Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement that the settlement was “the largest known copyright recovery in history.”
We look forward to making distributions to the chapter as soon as possible.” U.S. District Judge William Alsop issued initial approval in federal court in San Francisco last September, and has since retired. Alsup had a mixed ruling in the case last summer, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books was not illegal, but that Anthropic illegally obtained millions of books through pirate websites.
Anthropic Deputy General Counsel Aparna Sridhar highlighted the ruling on Friday as a milestone showing “that AI training on books is fair use under copyright law.” “We are pleased that more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of payment, and we look forward to bringing this matter to a conclusion,” Sridhar said in a written statement. Best-selling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz first filed the lawsuit along with two other authors in 2024. It is the first major settlement in dozens of AI copyright lawsuits still making their way through the courts.