It looks like creatives may have won their first victory against artificial intelligence (AI). A federal judge in California on Thursday preliminarily approved a landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a copyright class action brought by a group of authors against AI company Anthropic, according to the authors’ representatives.
Maria Pallante, the president of the publishing-industry trade group the Association of American Publishers, called the settlement “a major step in the right direction in holding AI developers accountable for reckless and unabashed infringement.”
According to a statement from the authors’ representatives, U.S. District Judge William Alsup called the proposed class-action settlement fair during a hearing on Thursday, Alsup had declined to approve the settlement earlier this month and asked the parties to answer several questions.
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Alsup will decide whether to give the settlement his final approval after notifying affected authors and giving them a chance to file claims.
In 2024, authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed a class action lawsuit against Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot. The authors alleged that Anthropic illegally used pirated copies of their copyrighted books—and hundreds of thousands of others—to train its large language model without permission or compensation. Central to the case was the use of “Books3,” a dataset sourced from shadow libraries known for distributing pirated ebooks.
While Anthropic argued that its use of the material was protected under “fair use” as transformative, a key ruling in 2025 by U.S. District Judge William Alsup allowed part of the case to proceed. The court found that Anthropic’s storage of over seven million unauthorized books in a centralized library for training purposes likely constituted copyright infringement.
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Plaintiffs Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson said in a statement that Alsup’s decision “brings us one step closer to real accountability for Anthropic and puts all AI companies on notice they can’t shortcut the law or override creators’ rights.”
This case is seen as a major milestone in AI-related copyright litigation, setting a precedent for future disputes involving OpenAI, Meta, and other AI developers. It underscores the legal risks of training AI on unlicensed data and has prompted wider discussions about copyright, fair use, and intellectual property in the age of generative AI. It also empowers authors to seek compensation when their work is exploited without consent.
The writers’ allegations echoed dozens of other lawsuits that have been brought by authors, news outlets, visual artists and others who say that tech companies stole their work to use in AI training.
Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said that the decision will allow the company to “focus on developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems.”