Anthropic to Pay $1.5 Billion to Settle Authors’ Copyright Lawsuit

Anthropic agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to resolve a copyright class action by authors who alleged the AI company used pirated books to train its large-language models, according to court filings. The deal, which equates to roughly $3,000 for each of about 500,000 works, would be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in U.S. history if approved. The settlement follows a June ruling by U.S. District Judge William Alsup that deemed Anthropic’s training practices “exceedingly transformative” and thus fair use, while clarifying that downloading pirated copies is not. Anthropic plans four payments, starting with $300 million within five business days of court approval. The outcome could influence parallel fights over AI training data, including lawsuits against OpenAI by bestselling authors such as John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult.

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