A federal judge has granted final approval of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with a group of authors and publishers who sued the AI company over copyright infringement. Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on the settlement Monday, following preliminary approval issued last year by Judge William Alsup, who has since retired.
The settlement, believed to be the largest in U.S. copyright law history, will distribute $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works. The case stemmed from Alsup’s earlier ruling that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books, sourced in part from pirate sites including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. While Alsup ruled that training AI models on copyrighted text constitutes fair use, he found the piracy-based acquisition method separately unlawful, prompting Anthropic to settle rather than proceed to trial.
Because the case was resolved through settlement rather than an appellate ruling, Alsup’s fair-use decision does not set binding precedent across the industry. Similar copyright disputes remain ongoing against companies including Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI. Last week, publishers including Hachette, Cengage, and Elsevier, along with author Scott Turow, filed a separate class action lawsuit against Google over its use of copyrighted works to train its Gemini AI model.
