Anthropic's $1.5B Copyright Deal Wins Final Approval
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Anthropic received final court approval for its $1.5 billion copyright class-action settlement, signed off Monday by Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
- Judge William Alsup, who issued preliminary approval last year after ruling Anthropic illegally downloaded millions of copyrighted books, has since retired; he had found that AI training on copyrighted text counts as fair use, but flagged Anthropic's use of pirate sites Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror as illegal.
- The settlement pays approximately $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works to authors and publishers — believed to be the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history.
- Anthropic agreed to the settlement specifically to avoid a jury trial on the piracy question and the risk of larger damages, according to the source.
- Because the case settled, it will not reach an appeals court, meaning Alsup's fair-use ruling for AI training will not become binding precedent and other judges remain free to reach their own conclusions.
- Google faces a fresh class-action copyright suit filed just last week by publishers including Hachette, Cengage, and Elsevier plus author Scott Turow over alleged use of their works to train Gemini, while parallel suits continue against Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI.
Why it matters: Authors and publishers receive roughly $3,000 per work across 500,000 works, but the settlement deprives them of the precedent they wanted: by settling the piracy question rather than going to trial, Anthropic ensured Judge Alsup's pro-AI fair-use ruling never gets appellate review. That leaves the copyright-vs-AI-training fight to play out piecemeal in cases now active against Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI.
