By Rajwa Quasim
A U.S. federal court on Monday approved a record-breaking $1.5 billion settlement in a copyright dispute filed by authors and publishers against artificial intelligence company Anthropic. The plaintiffs accused Anthropic of misusing their books to train Claude, the company’s AI chatbot.
The settlement is the largest known in a U.S. copyright case and the first major AI copyright dispute to be resolved before trial. Authors and publishers filed the lawsuit against Anthropic in 2024.
According to Tech Crunch, affected authors and publishers will receive $3,000 per work, covering roughly 500,000 works. The court also approved more than $101 million in legal fees while rejecting the objections raised by authors that the payout was too low. More than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement claimed the payment, according to Anthropic Deputy General Counsel Aparna Sridhar.
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Judge Araceli Martinez-Olgun approved the settlement on Monday, after the case’s original judge William Alsup granted preliminary approval in 2025; Alsup has retired since.
The judge had previously ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text could qualify as fair use, but the ruling did not excuse how Anthropic obtained the books.
According to the court, Anthropic acquired books in two ways: by purchasing and scanning copies legally, and by downloading others from piracy sites, including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The court found that Anthropic’s storage of more than seven million pirated books in a central repository violated copyright law.
Anthropic agreed to the settlement, avoiding a trial and reducing the risk of additional damages.
The case has also intensified debate over fair-use questions surrounding the use of copyrighted works to train AI models. The central issue remains whether training AI systems on copyrighted material is legal. The ruling suggests that future disputes may focus more heavily on how copyrighted material is acquired than on the training process itself.
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“We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court’s landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law — which remains the law today,” Sridhar said in a statement.
Some authors and publishers opted out of the settlement and have filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic that are still ongoing.
There are multiple lawsuits filed against big companies like Google, Meta, Midjourney and Open AI regarding the legality on training AI models on copyrighted works. A group of publishers and authors, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a class action lawsuit against Google over accusations that the company used their copyrighted works to train its AI platform, Gemini.
In another case, Anthropic is suing AI-enabled security firm Abnormal AI for trademark infringement, alleging that one of the startup’s rebranded logos resembles its own.