A federal court in San Francisco has approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit brought by authors over the use of their books to train the chatbot Claude. This was reported by Reuters.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin endorsed the deal and dismissed objections claiming the payouts were too low. The news agency described the settlement as the largest known copyright resolution in the United States.
The lawsuit against Anthropic was filed in 2024. Authors alleged that the company used pirated versions of their works without permission when training Claude.
Previously, Judge William Alsup had preliminarily approved the settlement. Last June, he ruled that training AI on books falls under fair use but found it a violation to store over seven million pirated books in a "central library" that was not necessarily used for training.
Anthropic's Deputy General Counsel Aparna Shridhar confirmed that the settlement was reached in 2025, following Alsup's ruling. According to her, over 91% of the authors and publishers eligible for the settlement have already requested their share of the payouts.
Lead attorney for the authors, Justin Nelson, called the settlement historic. Some authors objected to the deal, disputing the amount, the size of attorney fees, and the exclusion of certain rights holders. The judge dismissed these claims and awarded attorneys over $101 million from the requested $187.5 million.
Some authors and publishers opted out of the settlement and filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic. These legal battles are ongoing.
In February, Hollywood organizations accused the Chinese AI company ByteDance of piracy and demanded restrictions on its AI video generator Seedance 2.0.