A U.S. federal judge in San Francisco has given final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement in a class-action copyright lawsuit filed by a group of authors. The writers claimed that Anthropic used their books without permission to train its AI chatbot, Claude.
The settlement is the largest known copyright settlement in U.S. history and marks the first major AI copyright case in the country to reach a final settlement. The lawsuit was originally filed in 2024, with authors accusing Anthropic of using pirated copies of their books to train its AI models.
Anthropic said the agreement followed a landmark 2025 court ruling that training AI models on books qualifies as fair use under U.S. copyright law. The company also stated that more than 91% of eligible authors and publishers have already claimed their share of the settlement funds.
The authors' legal team described the agreement as a historic victory and said payments to eligible authors will begin as soon as possible.
Earlier, the court ruled that using books for AI training was protected under fair use. However, it also found that Anthropic violated copyright by storing more than 7 million pirated books in a central digital library, even if all of them were not used for AI training. A trial to determine damages had been expected before the settlement was reached.
Some authors objected to the settlement, arguing that the compensation was too low, that legal fees were too high, and that certain copyright owners were excluded. However, Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin rejected those objections, stating that the settlement offered a fair outcome considering the risks of going to trial.
The court approved over $101 million in legal fees for the plaintiffs' attorneys. Meanwhile, some authors and publishers who chose not to join the settlement have filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic, and those cases are still pending.
