Artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic has agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit from authors who accused the company of using their work without permission to train its AI models. According to the authors’ lawyers, the deal, which still requires approval from US District Judge William Alsup, would be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history. The agreement comes two months after Judge Alsup ruled that using books to train AI does not violate US copyright law, but still ordered Anthropic to face trial for its use of pirated material. On Friday, Anthropic stated that the settlement would “resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.”
This settlement is being announced as other major tech companies, including OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT), Microsoft, and Meta (Instagram’s parent company), face similar lawsuits over alleged copyright infringement. Anthropic, with its Claude chatbot, has long positioned itself as the ethical alternative to its competitors.
Lawsuit Details and Legal Precedent
The lawsuit was filed last year by best-selling mystery writer Andrea Bartz, along with The Good Nurse author Charles Graeber and The Feather Thief author Kirk Wallace Johnson. They claimed the company stole their work to train its Claude AI chatbot to build a multi-billion dollar business. According to Judge Alsup’s June ruling, the company held over seven million pirated books in a central library and faced up to $150,000 in damages per copyrighted work.
His ruling was among the first to explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) can legitimately learn from existing material. He found that Anthropic’s use of the authors’ books was “exceedingly transformative” and therefore allowed under US law. However, he did not dismiss the case, and Anthropic was set to stand trial in December over its use of pirated copies to build its content library.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers called the settlement “the first of its kind in the AI era.” Lawyer Justin Nelson, who represents the authors, stated, “It will provide meaningful compensation for each class work and sets a precedent requiring AI companies to pay copyright owners. This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong.”
