Anthropic’s $1.5 Billion Copyright Settlement Gets Final Court Approval
A U.S. court approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors over alleged unauthorized use of their books to train Claude.Summary
On July 20, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin gave final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with thousands of authors who alleged the company used pirated copies of their books to train its Claude chatbot. The ruling marks the largest known copyright settlement in U.S. history and the first major AI copyright case to reach a final settlement. Although the court had earlier ruled that training AI models on copyrighted books qualifies as fair use, it found that Anthropic stored more than seven million pirated books in a central digital library, an unauthorized storage that violated copyright law and formed the basis for the damages. More than 91% of eligible authors and publishers have claimed their share, and the court approved over $101 million in attorney fees, rejecting objections that the payout was too low. The settlement avoids a trial where potential damages could have reached hundreds of billions of dollars, but some authors have opted out and continue separate lawsuits, leaving the case as a key precedent for future AI‑copyright disputes.
(Source：Coinpedia)