US court approves Anthropic's record $1.5 billion AI copyright settlement

Published 21 July 2026 · tech

Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement has been approved in a landmark class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who accused the Claude maker of

Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement has been approved in a landmark class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who accused the Claude maker of using their books to train its AI model, according to a Reuters report. US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in San Francisco on Friday approved what could be the largest copyright settlement in US history. The deal was initially approved by now-retired Judge William Alsup in September last year. Notably, many popular AI chatbot makers have been sued by authors and news outlets over allegedly training their AI models on copyrighted material without permission. However, this is the first major AI copyright lawsuit in the US to reach a settlement. "We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court's landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law, which remains the law today," Anthropic Deputy General Counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement quoted by Reuters.

"We are pleased that more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment, and we're looking forward to bringing this matter to a close," Sridhar added. Meanwhile, the lead attorney for the authors, Justin Nelson, called it a "historic settlement". "It is the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the class as promptly as possible," Nelson said in a statement quoted by Reuters. Why was Anthropic sued? The lawsuit was filed in 2024 by a group of authors who alleged that Anthropic used pirated copies of their books without permission to train its Claude AI chatbot. The authors claimed that Anthropic maintained a repository containing more than 7 million pirated books, many of which were stored even if they were not eventually used to train the AI model.

In a landmark ruling last year, Judge William Alsup held that using copyrighted books to train AI models amounted to fair use under US copyright law. However, he also ruled that Anthropic could still be held liable for downloading and retaining millions of pirated books in its "central library". A trial in the case was set to begin in December to determine the potential damages, which could have run into hundreds of billions of dollars, before both sides agreed to settle. The proposed settlement was also challenged by a section of authors and publishers, who argued that the payout was too low, the plaintiffs' attorneys were overcompensated and some authors were wrongfully excluded from the agreement.