A U.S. court has approved a settlement agreement between Anthropic and a group of authors for 1.5 billion U.S. dollars (1.3 billion euros) in a case concerning the use of books to train the chatbot Claude. This marks the first major settlement in a wave of copyright lawsuits against companies developing artificial intelligence systems.
The 1.5 billion U.S. dollars (1.3 billion euros) settlement between Anthropic and the authors is the largest collective settlement in a copyright case in U.S. history. It is also the first large-scale settlement among lawsuits targeting artificial intelligence companies for using copyrighted books to train their models.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the agreement on July 20 in San Francisco, rejecting objections from some authors who deemed the proposed compensation insufficient. The settlement, first proposed in September of last year, resolves a class-action lawsuit filed in August 2024 by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of using illegally copied books to train the chatbot Claude.
Under the agreement, authors and publishers will receive 3,000 U.S. dollars (2,630 euros) for each of the approximately 500,000 works covered by the settlement. According to Anthropic, more than 91% of those eligible for compensation have already submitted their claims.
Background of the court decision
This case followed a decision by Judge William Alsup in June 2025, who ruled that training Claude on legally purchased books falls under the principle of fair use, while Anthropic‘s storage of millions of illegally copied books in a “central library” does not meet legal requirements.
This ruling put the company at risk of paying statutory damages of up to 150,000 U.S. dollars (131,000 euros) per work. If the case had proceeded to trial, it could have resulted in potential costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Reaction from the parties and broader context
Deputy General Counsel of Anthropic, Aparna Sridhar, stated that the company welcomes the settlement. Lead attorney for the plaintiffs, Justin Nelson, described it as “the largest publicly known copyright infringement settlement in history.”
This case is one of dozens of ongoing lawsuits in the U.S. against companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta regarding the use of copyrighted materials to train artificial intelligence models.
Source: Euronews
