Authors to receive about $3,000 per book under class-action deal
SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín on Monday approved a $1.5 billion class-action settlement that requires Anthropic to pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after the company used pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot.
Martínez-Olguín said in her ruling that the settlement provides “meaningful relief” to affected authors and publishers, according to court documents.
About 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling have been claimed by authors or publishers, the judge noted.
Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement that the settlement was “the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible.”
The case was originally filed in 2024 by bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and two other authors. U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued preliminary approval last September in San Francisco federal court. Alsup, who has since retired, found that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books was not illegal, but determined that Anthropic had wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.