Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright deal gets final approval

Anthropic can now begin paying authors and publishers after a federal judge granted final approval to the company’s $1.5 billion class action copyright settlement, according to Reuters.

The case centered on how Anthropic built a library of books used to train its models. Last year, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California gave preliminary approval to the settlement after ruling that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books. Alsup has since retired, and Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin issued the final approval on Monday.

The settlement will pay $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, with the money shared among the authors and publishers that hold the rights. It is believed to be the largest settlement in U.S. copyright law history.

But the outcome is far from a clean win for creators. On the central legal issue, Alsup ruled in Anthropic’s favor, finding that training a model on copyrighted text qualifies as fair use. That decision has been widely viewed as a major moment for the industry.

Recommended reading

Skyworth TV buyer finds 8GB, not 32GB

Anthropic’s problem was not the training itself, but how some of the books were obtained. The company built its library from two sources:

• books it purchased and scanned
• books it downloaded from pirate sites including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror

Alsup found the piracy-based downloads illegal and said that issue could proceed to trial. Anthropic then agreed to settle rather than risk a jury award.

The case is over, but the broader legal fight is not. Because Alsup’s ruling came from a single district court and Anthropic settled, the dispute will not reach an appeals court or become binding precedent. Other courts can still rule differently in similar cases now pending against Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI.

That pressure is already building. Just last week, publishers and authors including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a class action lawsuit against Google, alleging the company used copyrighted works to train Gemini.