AI company Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B copyright settlement
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, just agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit from authors who said their books were used—without permission—to train its AI.
The deal, still waiting for a judge's approval, could be the biggest copyright payout ever.
Authors sued Anthropic in 2024
Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued Anthropic in 2024 after discovering their work—along with millions of other pirated books from sites like Library Genesis—had been stored and used for AI training.
Earlier this year, Judge William Alsup said using copyrighted books might count as "fair use," but keeping over 7 million pirated copies in a central library was a clear violation of rights.
Settlement could influence future of AI training data sourcing
This is the first big settlement over how AI companies use copyrighted content—and it comes as similar lawsuits against tech giants like OpenAI and Meta heat up.
While it doesn't set new legal rules yet, it puts more pressure on AI companies to rethink how they get their data and could shape future industry standards.