Anthropic can now pay out $1.5bn to settle a copyright suit
A federal judge has given final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with a group of authors and book publishers. Reuters reported the decision on Monday.
Anthropic can now start issuing payments. The lab was accused of copyright infringement in a class action lawsuit.
Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued preliminary approval last year. He ruled that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books.
Alsup has since retired. Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on the settlement on Monday.
The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works. These funds are shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them. While the settlement is believed to be the largest in the history of U.S. copyright law, many authors and creators still do not view it as a win.
The legal question was resolved in a way that leaves writers unsatisfied. Alsup sided with Anthropic on the core issue. He ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text counts as fair use. This decision is widely seen as a turning point for the AI industry.
The ruling did not excuse how Anthropic obtained the books in the first place. Anthropic built its training library from two sources. One source was books the company purchased and scanned. This method was fine. The other source was books downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.
Alsup found the second method illegal on its own terms. He said that piracy question could go to trial. Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon after to avoid a trial and whatever damages a jury might have awarded.
While the final approval closes out this case, it does not settle the legal question industry-wide. Alsup’s ruling was a single district court decision. Anthropic’s decision to settle means the case will never reach an appeals court to become binding precedent.
Other judges are still free to reach their own conclusions on their own facts. This is exactly what is playing out elsewhere. There is still a string of copyright lawsuits against companies such as Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI over whether it is legal to train AI models on copyrighted works.
Just last week, a group of publishers and authors filed a class action lawsuit against Google. The group includes Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. They accuse the company of using their copyrighted works to train its AI platform, Gemini.
What it means
Authors and publishers are receiving money, but the legal principle allowing AI training remains open for debate in other courts. Writers whose work was scanned legally will get paid. Those whose work was stolen from pirate sites will also receive a share of the funds, though the underlying theft was admitted as illegal. The industry faces continued litigation as other judges rule on similar cases.
