Published on
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.
Under the deal, authors and publishers receive $3,000 (€2,630) for each of an estimated 500,000 works covered by the settlement. More than 91% of those eligible have already filed claims, according to Anthropic.
The case followed a June 2025 ruling by then-presiding judge William Alsup, who found that training Claude on lawfully acquired books qualified as fair use, but that Anthropic’s storage of millions of pirated books in a “central library” did not.
That finding exposed the company to statutory damages of up to $150,000 (€131,000) per work, a potential bill running into the hundreds of billions of dollars had the case gone to trial in December.
Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, Aparna Sridhar, said the company welcomed the resolution.
The plaintiffs’ lead attorney, Justin Nelson, described it as the largest publicly known copyright recovery in history.
The case is one of dozens still working through US courts against companies including OpenAI, Google and Meta over AI training practices.