Federal judge approves Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement with authors and publishers

A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement resolving a class action copyright lawsuit filed by authors and publishers. The settlement ends litigation over Anthropic’s use of copyrighted works, but does not resolve the broader legal question of whether training AI models on copyrighted text constitutes fair use.

The payout allocates $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, with funds distributed to authors and publishers holding rights to those works. The settlement is reported to be the largest in the history of U.S. copyright law.

The court’s decision follows a prior ruling by Judge William Alsup, who found that training an AI model on copyrighted text qualifies as fair use. However, Alsup also determined that Anthropic had illegally obtained some books by downloading them from pirate sites such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Anthropic later agreed to settle to avoid trial on the piracy issue.

Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, who signed the final approval, took over after Alsup’s retirement. The settlement closes this case but does not establish binding precedent, as it was approved rather than decided on appeal. Other courts remain free to reach different conclusions on similar facts.

The ruling leaves unresolved a broader wave of copyright lawsuits against AI companies including Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI, all of which face similar claims regarding the use of copyrighted works to train AI models. Last week, a group of publishers and authors including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a new class action lawsuit against Google alleging its AI platform Gemini was trained on their copyrighted works.