Anthropic Cleared By Federal Judge In $1.5B Copyright Settlement
A federal judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement letting Anthropic resolve claims that it used pirated books to train its Claude AI.Summary
On [date? not given] a San Francisco federal judge, Araceli Martínez‑Olguín, gave final approval to a $1.5‑billion settlement between AI developer Anthropic and thousands of authors whose books were allegedly pirated to train the Claude chatbot. The agreement is the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history.
Under the deal, Anthropic will fund a payout pool of $1.5 billion, with eligible rightsholders receiving about $3,000 per book, and must destroy all copies of works taken from known pirated repositories such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The settlement covers only past downloading and training activities; authors retain the right to sue over any future model training, unlisted works, or outputs generated by Claude, and several publishers have opted out to pursue separate actions. The lawsuit, Bartz v. Anthropic, began in 2024 after authors claimed Anthropic used illicit digital libraries; an earlier ruling had found that training on books is not infringing but using pirated content is, leading to the September 2025 settlement agreement.
(Source：Asianet Newsable)