US judge approves Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement

WASHINGTON: A federal judge in San Francisco has granted final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement in a class action copyright case brought by a group of authors who accused the artificial intelligence company of improperly using their books to train its Claude chatbot.

US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on the deal on Monday, making it the largest known settlement in a US copyright case. The case is also the first major US lawsuit over large language model training to reach a settlement, among dozens of actions filed by copyright holders, including authors and news organisations, against technology companies.

The agreement had initially received approval from now-retired Judge William Alsup last September. On Monday, Judge Martinez-Olguin rejected objections from some authors who had argued that the settlement amount was too low, that lawyers for the plaintiffs were being overpaid, or that some copyright owners had been improperly left out.

In her ruling, the judge said concerns about the size of the settlement were not grounded in a realistic view of the potential risks and benefits of going to trial. She also approved more than $101 million in legal fees for the attorneys, out of the $187.5 million they had sought.

Background to the case

The lawsuit was filed in 2024 by writers who said Anthropic, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, used pirated copies of their books without consent to train Claude to answer user prompts.

Last June, Judge Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s use of the authors’ works for training Claude amounted to fair use under copyright law. However, he also found that the company had infringed the authors’ rights by storing more than 7 million pirated books in what he described as a central library that would not necessarily be used for AI training.

A trial had been due to begin last December to determine what Anthropic might owe over the alleged piracy. Potential damages could have reached into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Statements from Anthropic and plaintiffs

Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said the company believed the earlier court ruling remained significant to the case.

“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”, he stated.

Sridhar added “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”.

The authors’ lead attorney, Justin Nelson, also welcomed the outcome and described it as a major recovery for copyright holders.

“It is the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible”, he added.

Some authors and publishers chose to opt out of the settlement and have separately sued Anthropic in cases that remain pending.