Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approves a $1.5 billion copyright settlement between the AI company Anthropic and a class of authors.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted final approval on Monday for a $1.5 billion settlement between the artificial intelligence company Anthropic and a class of authors. The ruling settles a lawsuit regarding Anthropic using pirated books from websites like Library Genesis to train its Claude chatbot. The settlement, described by plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson as the largest known copyright recovery in history, provides authors with approximately $3,100 for each of the 482,000 works covered by the agreement. The lawsuit was originally filed in 2024 by Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. The court ruled that while training AI on books is fair use, Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of works through pirate sources. As part of the agreement, Anthropic must destroy the original pirated files within 30 days and pay over $101 million in attorney fees. Anthropic general counsel Aparna Sridhar noted that 91% of authors have already claimed their shares.