A United States federal judge has granted final approval to a landmark US$1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) settlement between artificial intelligence company Anthropic and a group of authors who accused the firm of unlawfully using their books to train its AI chatbot, Claude.
The ruling, delivered on Monday by US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in San Francisco, marks the largest known settlement in a United States copyright case and the first major lawsuit over AI training practices to be resolved through a settlement.
The class action was filed in 2024 by a group of authors who alleged that Anthropic, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, used pirated copies of their books without permission to train Claude, the company’s large language model.
The settlement had previously received preliminary approval from the late US District Judge William Alsup in September last year.
Although Judge Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books for AI training constituted fair use under US copyright law, he found that the company had infringed the authors’ rights by storing more than seven million pirated books in what was described as a “central library”. The judge concluded that the repository was not necessarily maintained solely for AI training purposes.
A trial had been scheduled for last December to determine the damages arising from the alleged copyright infringement. The potential financial liability was estimated to run into hundreds of billions of dollars.
During Monday’s hearing, lawyers representing the authors said claims had been submitted for more than 92 per cent of the over 480,000 works covered by the settlement.
Despite the court’s approval, the agreement attracted objections from some authors, who argued that the compensation was inadequate, that the legal fees awarded to the plaintiffs’ lawyers were excessive, or that certain copyright holders had been unfairly excluded from the settlement.
Several authors and publishers also chose to opt out of the agreement and have continued to pursue separate copyright lawsuits against Anthropic.
The case is regarded as a significant milestone in the growing legal battle between copyright owners and technology companies over the use of protected creative works to develop generative artificial intelligence systems. Dozens of similar lawsuits involving authors, publishers and news organisations against AI developers remain before US courts.
