Judge approves Anthropic $1.5 billion settlement over book piracy

Judge approves Anthropic $1.5 billion settlement over book piracy

A federal judge has granted final approval to a $1.5 billion class-action settlement involving AI company Anthropic. The payout follows allegations that the company used pirated books to train its Claude chatbot.

In an order issued Monday, District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín stated the agreement provides meaningful relief to authors and publishers. The settlement is described by plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson as the largest known copyright recovery in history.

The legal battle began in 2024 when bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz, along with Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, filed a copyright lawsuit. The plaintiffs accused Anthropic of engaging in Napster-style downloading of millions of works, alleging the company intentionally acquired unlicensed copies of books from piracy sites such as Library Gensis for commercial gain. The complaint argued this allowed the AI to mimic the style, themes, and syntax of the original authors.

The case saw a complex trajectory in the San Francisco federal court. Former Judge William Alsup, who has since retired, issued a mixed ruling last summer. Alsup determined that the actual process of training AI models on copyrighted books was protected under fair use. However, he found that Anthropic’s act of downloading and maintaining a permanent digital library of more than seven million pirated books—some of which may not have even been used for training—was not protected by law.

Anthropic agreed to the $1.5 billion settlement in September 2025 to avoid a trial over the piracy issue, which could have potentially exposed the company to hundreds of billions of dollars in damages. Judge Alsup provided preliminary approval of the deal before his retirement.

The settlement covers more than 482,000 works, with payouts estimated at roughly $3,000 per book. Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar told Gizmodo and Reuters that more than 91% of the authors and publishers covered by the settlement have already claimed their share. Sridhar noted that the settlement followed the court's landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law—which remains the law today.

Despite the approval, the settlement does not resolve all legal challenges for the AI firm. Some authors and publishers opted out of the class action to pursue individual lawsuits. Additionally, Anthropic still faces copyright litigation from Chicken Soup for the Soul and other authors who contend that the $3,000 per book payment is insufficient.

Because the case settled without going to trial or reaching a higher court, it does not establish binding legal precedent for other ongoing AI copyright disputes. Many of those cases remain tied up in the court system, including combined lawsuits in a Manhattan federal court brought by authors like George R.R. Martin, Sarah Silverman, John Grisham, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, as well as The New York Times and other newspapers against OpenAI. Other major disputes involve entertainment giants Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Universal against Midjourney, and lawsuits by major record labels against the AI music company Suno.

Attorney Justin Nelson stated that the legal team looks forward to making distributions to the class as promptly as possible.