Anthropic has reached a settlement of $1.5 billion in a class-action lawsuit filed by a group of authors who alleged that the company was using their books without permission to train Claude, its AI chatbot. The deal requires the approval of U.S. District Judge William Alsup and would be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, according to lawyers for the authors. Anthropic said on Friday that the settlement would “resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.”
This comes around two months after Judge Alsup found that using books to train AI did not violate US copyright law, but ordered Anthropic to stand trial over its use of pirated material. Anthropic told the court that it made fair use of the books and that U.S. copyright law “not only allows but encourages” its AI training because it promotes human creativity. This judgement was criticized by the authors, who said “Anthropic “seeks to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works.”
READ: Windsurf alleges Anthropic is restricting direct access to Claude AI models (June 5, 2025)
This lawsuit is the first of many against tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms, regarding the use of copyrighted materials for training generative AI systems. As part of the settlement, Anthropic agreed to destroy the downloaded copies of the books that the authors claimed were pirated. However, the company may still face infringement claims related to outputs generated by its AI models.
The lawsuit was initiated last year by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson who stated that Anthropic unlawfully used millions of pirated books to train Claude to respond to user prompts. The plaintiffs’ lawyers called the latest settlement “the first of its kind in the AI era.”
Alex Yang, Professor of Management Science and Operations at London Business School said that the settlement could encourage more cooperation between AI developers and creators. “You need that fresh training data from human beings,” he said. “If you want to grant more copyright to AI-created content, you must also strengthen mechanisms that compensate humans for their original contributions.”
Following Alsup’s ruling, another San Francisco judge presiding over a similar case against Meta said that using copyrighted material without permission for AI training could be deemed unlawful in “many circumstances.” Back in June, a similar copyright-infringement lawsuit filed against Meta was dismissed by a federal judge. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabri said that the 13 authors who sued Meta “made the wrong arguments,” and that they hadn’t presented enough evidence that the technology company’s AI would dilute the market for their work to show that its conduct was illegal under U.S. copyright law. However, he also said that the ruling is limited to the authors in the case and does not mean that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials is lawful.