Anthropic to Pay $1.5 Billion in Copyright Settlement
A San Francisco federal judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement between AI firm Anthropic and authors who said the company downloaded their books without permission, marking the biggest copyright class-action settlement to date.
A U.S. district judge in San Francisco approved a $1.5 billion settlement that resolves claims by a class of authors who alleged Anthropic illegally downloaded their copyrighted books from sites such as LibGen and PiLiMi. The settlement, described by the court as the largest copyright class-action settlement in history, addresses how the books were obtained, not the legality of using copyrighted material to train AI models, which the court has already ruled as fair use.
"The settlement does not release Anthropic from liability for future claims based on the output of AI models," Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said in the order.
Under the agreement, authors and publishers whose works appear on Anthropic’s "Works List" may receive roughly $3,000 per book, a rate four times higher than the typical minimum award in copyright infringement cases. More than 91 percent of the eligible works—over 440,000 titles—have already been claimed, and Anthropic is required to delete the pirated files it downloaded.
The court rejected 54 objections and comments from class members and third parties, including proposals to expand the list of covered works, add non-monetary remedies such as source attribution, or delete Anthropic’s AI models entirely, stating those requests exceeded the scope of the lawsuit. While the settlement closes the case, the court will continue to monitor the distribution of funds to the authors.