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Judge approves Anthropic AI settlement in copyright class action
The settlement caps a case tied to a finding that Anthropic’s training on books can be fair use, while also addressing allegations over storing more than 7 million pirated works.
A federal judge in San Francisco has granted final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors who accused the company of misusing their books to train its Claude AI chatbot, according to Insurance Journal.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin rejected arguments that the deal was too small and said objections to the settlement size were not grounded in a realistic assessment of the risks and rewards of going to trial. The judge also approved attorney fee awards, granting more than $101 million of the $187.5 million fee request.
The case was among dozens filed by copyright owners against tech firms over large language model training. It was the first major U.S. case to settle, after a prior ruling by Judge William Alsup last June that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law, but that Anthropic violated rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a so-called central library that would not necessarily be used for training.
Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said the company reached the settlement in 2025 following the fair-use ruling, and indicated it looks to make distributions to the class promptly. The writers sued Anthropic in 2024, and while some authors and publishers opted out and have filed separate lawsuits that are still ongoing, a trial had been scheduled to determine potential damages that could have run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.