After AI hit the scene a few years ago, writers like George R.R. Martin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, as well as media companies like The New York Times and Disney, quickly sued AI companies, accusing them of stealing their work to train their models. There have been dozens of lawsuits filed, and even though most still remain tied up in court years later, one of them is finally set to produce an actual payout. Reuters is reporting that Anthropic is set to cut checks to the authors and publishers of roughly 500,000 works covered by a class-action settlement with the company. A federal judge gave final approval on Monday to the proposed $1.5 billion payout, a figure that would make it the largest known copyright settlement in U.S. history. The original class-action lawsuit was filed in 2024 and accused Anthropic of using hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books to train its AI models without permission. The lawsuit also claimed the company did not obtain many of the books legally, but instead downloaded them from piracy sites like Library Gensis.
“It intentionally downloaded known pirated copies of books from the internet, made unlicensed copies of them, and then used those unlicensed copies to digest and analyze the copyrighted expression-all for its own commercial gain,” the complaint states. “The end result is a model built on the work of thousands of authors, meant to mimic the syntax, style, and themes of the copyrighted works on which it was trained.”
