Each payout will amount to roughly $3,000 going to some 500,000 pieces of works.
A US judge has approved Anthropic’s $1.5bn settlement of a major AI copyright lawsuit filed by a trio of authors, setting the record for the largest settlement in copyright law in the country’s history.
In their 2024 lawsuit, authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson accused Anthropic pirating their copyrighted material to train Claude. “Largescale theft of copyrighted works” is a key component of the company’s business model, they said.
The court found that Anthropic illegally acquired millions of books through shadow libraries, but ruled that the company was protected by fair use when using books to train its AI models. The lawsuit was certified as a class action last July, the first in copyright litigation against AI companies.
Anthropic agreed to settle last August, a month after it claimed that a settlement could present a “death knell” situation for the company.
