Anthropic Gets US Court Nod for $1.5 Bn AI Copyright Lawsuit Settlement

A US federal judge granted final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement in a copyright class action brought by a group of authors, marking the largest publicly known settlement in a US copyright case.

The ruling brings one of the first major AI copyright disputes in the United States closer to a conclusion, although separate lawsuits by authors who opted out of the settlement remain pending.

US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in San Francisco approved the settlement on Monday, rejecting objections from some authors who argued that the compensation was inadequate and that the plaintiffs' lawyers would receive an excessive share of the payout, as per Reuters.

The judge concluded that concerns over the settlement amount were "not grounded in a realistic assessment of the overall risks and rewards of a trial," Reuters reported.

She also awarded the plaintiffs' legal team more than $101 million in legal fees, lower than the $187.5 million they had requested.

The settlement had initially received preliminary approval from now-retired Judge William Alsup in September last year.

Case On AI Training And Pirated Books

Filed in 2024, the lawsuit alleged that Anthropic used pirated copies of books without permission to train its AI chatbot, Claude. The company, backed by Amazon and Alphabet, denied wrongdoing.

Judge Alsup ruled in June last year that using copyrighted books to train Claude qualified as fair use under US copyright law. However, he also found that Anthropic had infringed copyright by storing more than seven million pirated books in what he described as a "central library", regardless of whether all of those works were ultimately used for AI training, as per Reuters.

A trial scheduled for December to determine potential damages, could have reached hundreds of billions of dollars, but was subsequently avoided through the settlement.

Authors Welcome Outcome, Separate Cases Continue

The authors' lead attorney, Justin Nelson, described the agreement as a "historic settlement."

"It is the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible," Nelson said in a statement, as per Reuters.

Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said, "We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court's landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law — which remains the law today."

"We are pleased that more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment, and we're looking forward to bringing this matter to a close."

Some authors and publishers chose not to join the settlement and have continued pursuing separate copyright claims against Anthropic, which remain before the courts.