A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion settlement from Anthropic PBC to authors and publishers, resolving the largest copyright class-action lawsuit in history.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín called the settlement fair, noting the plaintiffs' success at trial was not assured. The payment awards $3,000 for each of the roughly 500,000 copyrighted works Anthropic copied from pirate libraries to develop its Claude chatbot.
The plaintiffs alleged Anthropic used works from illegal piracy websites, including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The company is now required to destroy all pirated material.
While a separate ruling found training AI on copyrighted books qualifies as fair use, obtaining those books from pirate sites was ruled an infringement. The core legal question of using copyrighted material for AI training remains unresolved in other pending lawsuits against companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI.
“We are pleased that more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share,” said Anthropic’s deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar.