Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion copyright settlement to authors, publishers

OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) — The largest copyright class action settlement in history was granted final approval Monday, with $1.5 billion awarded to authors and creators whose work was used by artificial intelligence company Anthropic to train its large language models.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín wrote in her judgment that the settlement was fair, reasonable and adequate.

“The $1.5 billion settlement provides substantial benefits to the class in light of the novel claims asserted,” the Joe Biden appointee wrote. “Success at trial was not assured, and a loss would have left the class with no recourse.”

Fifty-four known class members and over 500,000 potential class members will each receive an estimated $3,100 per work, from approximately 482,000 works.

Class members in the case include “all beneficial or legal copyright owners of the exclusive right to reproduce copies of any book in the versions of LibGen or PiLiMi downloaded by Anthropic.”

The plaintiffs said Anthropic trained its AI models on datasets it knew contained hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books from websites known to have pirated material, such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.

They claimed Anthropic’s mass use of pirated material violated copyright law and deprived authors of book sales and licensing revenues, all while building a profitable generative AI tool that could threaten writers’ careers.

“It is not consistent with core human values or the public benefit to download hundreds of thousands of books from a known illegal source,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint. “Anthropic has attempted to steal the fire of Prometheus. It is no exaggeration to say that Anthropic’s model seeks to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works.”

The parties were heading to a trial in December 2025 before reaching an agreement in late August. Former Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup, a Bill Clinton appointee, granted preliminary approval on Sept. 25, 2025.

“We are gratified by the court’s ruling granting final approval of this historic settlement,” plaintiffs’ attorney Justin Nelson said in an email to Courthouse News. “It is the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the class as promptly as possible.”

Anthropic already paid $300 million to the fund shortly after receiving preliminary approval of the settlement, with an additional $300 million expected five days from Monday’s final approval. The additional payments will be split into $450 million on both the first and second anniversaries of preliminary approval.

In addition to monetary relief for the plaintiffs, Anthropic will also be required to destroy the original files of the works they downloaded from the pirated book datasets within 30 days of the final judgment and certify Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror datasets with pirated material were used in training any of the company’s commercially released large language models.

Attorney fees were calculated at over $101,560,000, or about 7% of the settlement fund, and expenses totaling approximately $2,635,000, with $18,220,000 more in anticipated expenses. Each of the three class representatives will receive a $15,000 service award.

Representatives for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.