Anthropic settles AI copyright lawsuit for $1.5bn
A federal court in San Francisco has officially approved a $1.5 billion (around €1.3 billion) settlement between AI developer Anthropic and a collective of writers. The settlement stems from a class-action lawsuit claiming that the company had unlawfully used literary works to train its AI chatbot Claude.
Presiding judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín rejected objections to the size of the compensation. This makes it the largest settlement ever in a US copyright case.
The legal dispute began in 2024, when authors claimed that Anthropic, which receives financial backing from Alphabet and Amazon, had used unauthorised copies of their books to train its language model.
Although Judge William Alsup had previously ruled that the use of such texts for AI training fell under ‘fair use’, the federal court found that Anthropic had overstepped legal boundaries by maintaining a huge internal archive of more than 7 million illegally copied titles. In order to avoid a lawsuit that could have led to total damages amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars, the two parties reached this agreement.
Distribution of the fund
Aparna Sridhar, who represents Anthropic’s legal team, noted that more than 91% of eligible publishers and authors have already submitted a claim for their share of the fund.
Justin Nelson, the lead counsel for the authors, described the outcome as a historic victory and pointed to the aim of distributing the funds quickly. Although this case is the first major settlement of its kind among the numerous lawsuits that tech companies face in relation to AI training, some individuals have chosen to opt out and continue their separate legal actions against the company.
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