Anthropic settles with authors and publishers for $1.5B in landmark copyright case
A federal judge today approved a $1.5 billion settlement awarded to authors and publishers whose works were used by Anthropic PBC to train the AI chatbot, Claude, in what is the largest copyright class action settlement in history.
Judge William Alsup issued a preliminary approval of the settlement last year, though he has since retired, with U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín today calling the settlement fair and adequate.
“The $1.5 billion settlement provides substantial benefits to the class in light of the novel claims asserted,” she wrote. “Success at trial was not assured, and a loss would have left the class with no recourse.”
The payout means authors and publishers will receive $3,000 for each of the roughly 500,000 works that Anthropic copied from pirate libraries while developing its AI chatbot, Claude. The plaintiffs alleged that Anthropic trained its models on hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books obtained from illegal piracy websites such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.
