A U.S. federal judge has approved Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a copyright lawsuit brought by a class of authors who accused the artificial intelligence company of using pirated books to train its Claude AI chatbot.
The ruling, issued on Monday by U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in San Francisco, finalises what is believed to be the largest copyright settlement in U.S. legal history and marks the first major AI copyright case in the country to reach a settlement.
In approving the agreement, Judge Martinez-Olguin rejected objections from some authors who argued the settlement amount was inadequate, unfairly compensated the plaintiffs’ lawyers and excluded certain copyright holders.
The judge ruled that critics had failed to realistically weigh the risks and uncertainties of taking the case to trial.
She also approved more than $101 million in legal fees for the plaintiffs’ attorneys, down from the $187.5 million they had requested.
The lawsuit, filed in 2024, alleged that Anthropic used millions of pirated books without permission to train Claude, its large language model.
Last year, then-presiding Judge William Alsup delivered a split ruling that has become one of the most significant legal decisions in the AI industry.
He held that using copyrighted books to train an AI model constituted fair use under U.S. copyright law. However, he also found that Anthropic infringed copyright by maintaining a digital library containing more than seven million pirated books, many of which were not necessarily used for AI training.
That finding exposed the company to potentially massive financial liability, with damages that could have reached hundreds of billions of dollars had the case proceeded to trial.
Anthropic said the settlement reflects the legal framework established by the court’s earlier fair-use decision.
Deputy General Counsel Aparna Sridhar said the company was pleased that more than 91% of eligible authors and publishers had claimed their share of the settlement.
She added that Anthropic looks forward to bringing the matter to a close.
Lead counsel for the authors, Justin Nelson, described the deal as a landmark victory for copyright holders.
He called it the largest known copyright recovery in history and said distributions to participating authors would begin as soon as possible.
Not all copyright holders accepted the settlement.
Some authors and publishers opted out of the class action and are pursuing separate lawsuits against Anthropic, meaning the company continues to face additional copyright litigation over its AI training practices.
The Anthropic settlement is one of dozens of lawsuits filed by authors, publishers and media organisations against artificial intelligence companies over the use of copyrighted works to train large language models.
Its resolution is expected to influence future negotiations and litigation involving AI developers, particularly as courts continue to define the boundaries between copyright protection and the fair use of creative works in the age of generative artificial intelligence.
