Published on
21/07/2026 - 12:36 GMT+2
A US federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion (€1.3bn) settlement between Anthropic and a group of authors, closing the largest copyright class action in US history and marking the first major resolution of a wave of lawsuits against AI companies over the use of copyrighted books in model training.
US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the deal on 20 July in San Francisco, rejecting objections from some authors who argued the payout was too small.
The settlement, first proposed last September, resolves a class action filed by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August 2024, who accused Anthropic of using pirated books to train its Claude chatbot.
