Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement approved
A U.S. federal judge has approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers over copyright infringement, while ruling that training AI on copyrighted works is fair use.
A federal judge in California gave final approval Monday to Anthropic's landmark $1.5 billion class action copyright settlement, according to Reuters. Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on the deal, which resolves claims that the AI lab illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books.
The settlement had received preliminary approval last year from Judge William Alsup, who has since retired. Alsup ruled that Anthropic's method of downloading books from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror was illegal, but he also made a key ruling that training AI models on copyrighted text constitutes fair use — a decision seen as pivotal for the AI industry.
Under the settlement, Anthropic will pay $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, shared among authors and publishers. While this is believed to be the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history, many creators view it as a mixed outcome because the core legal question of fair use was not fully litigated.
Anthropic agreed to the settlement to avoid a trial on the piracy issue, which could have resulted in higher damages. However, because the case settled, it will not go to an appeals court, meaning Alsup's fair-use ruling does not set binding precedent. Other judges remain free to reach their own conclusions in separate cases.
Ongoing lawsuits against Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI continue. Just last week, a group of publishers including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, and author Scott Turow filed a class action against Google over its Gemini AI training.
