A federal judge has approved a US$1.5 billion (NZ$2.5 billion) copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay approximately US$3,000 (NZ$5,142) per book to thousands of authors who used pirated copies of their works to train their Claude chatbot.
District Judge Araceli Martinez Holguin said in Monday’s ruling that the class action settlement provides “meaningful relief” to affected authors and publishers.
Approximately 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the judgment currently have bills due from authors or publishers.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement that the settlement is “the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the class as soon as possible.”
U.S. District Judge William Alsup gave preliminary approval in San Francisco federal court last September and has since retired. Last summer, Alsup issued a complex ruling in the case, finding that although it is not illegal to train AI chatbots with copyrighted books, Anthropic had improperly obtained millions of books through pirated websites.
Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, called Friday’s ruling a landmark showing that “training AI with books is fair use under copyright law.”
“We are pleased that more than 91% of the authors and publishers covered by the settlement have requested their share of the payments, and we look forward to bringing this matter to a close,” Sridhar said in a written statement.
Best-selling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz filed her first lawsuit in 2024, along with two other authors. This is the first major settlement in dozens of AI copyright cases still pending in court.
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