Each payout per work will amount to roughly $3,000, to be paid to around 500,000 works.
A US judge has approved Anthropic’s $1.5bn settlement of a major AI copyright lawsuit filed by a trio of authors, setting the record for the largest settlement in copyright law in the country’s history.
In their 2024 lawsuit, authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson accused Anthropic pirating their copyrighted material to train Claude. “Largescale theft of copyrighted works” is a key component of the company’s business model, they said.
The court found that Anthropic illegally acquired millions of books through shadow libraries, but ruled that the company was protected by fair use when using books to train its AI models. The lawsuit was certified as a class action last July, the first in copyright litigation against AI companies.
Anthropic agreed to settle last August, a month after it claimed that a settlement could present a “death knell” situation for the company.
Divided up between some 500,000 works, each payout per work under the approved settlement will amount to roughly $3,000, which the court pointed out is four-times the statutory damages awarded for “wilful infringement”.
The class includes copyright owners whose works were found in shadow libraries LibGen and PiLiMi, which were downloaded by Anthropic.
In a statement, Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said that the company is “looking forward to bringing this matter to a close”.
“We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court’s landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law – which remains the law today.
“We are pleased that more than 91pc of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment.”
The settlement received preliminary approval late last September.
Anthropic was valued at $183bn last September after a $13bn Series F round, and nearly a year later, the company is now nearing a $1trn valuation while readying itself for a blockbuster public listing.
For comparison, the $1.5bn settlement makes up roughly 0.8pc of Anthropic’s September valuation and marginally more than 0.1pc of its value after the May raise.
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