Judge Approves Anthropic's $1.5 Billion Copyright Settlement Over 500,000 Works
Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Jul 21
Judge Approves Anthropic's $1.5 Billion Copyright Settlement Over 500,000 Works
3 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Jul 21
Summary
A federal judge on Monday gave final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion class-action settlement, clearing payments to authors and publishers over about 500,000 copyrighted works.
The deal pays $3,000 per work and stems from Judge William Alsup’s finding that Anthropic illegally downloaded and stored millions of books from pirate sites, even though he said AI training on copyrighted text was fair use.
Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed the final order after Alsup’s retirement; Anthropic settled after Alsup said the piracy issue could go to trial and expose it to jury-awarded damages.
The case closes without an appeal, leaving Alsup’s fair-use ruling nonbinding and the broader legality of AI training on copyrighted works unsettled across the industry.
That uncertainty is already feeding other lawsuits against Google, Meta, Midjourney and OpenAI, including a new class action filed last week against Google over Gemini training.
Anthropic paid $1.5B, but why do many authors see the landmark AI settlement as a loss for creators?
With over 100 lawsuits pending, will AI's future be built on licensing deals or courtroom battles?
$1.5 Billion Anthropic Copyright Settlement Sets New Precedent for AI Data Sourcing and Creator Rights
Overview
In August 2025, Anthropic agreed to a landmark $1.5 billion settlement after facing a major class-action lawsuit that began in August 2024. The lawsuit accused Anthropic of using pirated copies of about 500,000 copyrighted books from illicit online sources to train its AI models without permission. As a result, both authors and publishers became eligible for payouts from the settlement fund. To ensure fair distribution, an Author-Publisher Working Group was proposed to manage how the funds would be allocated, marking a significant moment for copyright and AI in the publishing industry.