Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion（約2400億円） to settle author piracy lawsuit over Claude training

On Monday, federal Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved a landmark $1.5 billion（約2400億円） copyright settlement between Anthropic and thousands of authors whose pirated works were used to train the Claude chatbot. The settlement will distribute roughly $3,000 per book to affected authors and publishers, with about 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling already claimed by their owners.

The path to this settlement began in 2024, when bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and two co-plaintiffs filed suit against Anthropic. Last summer, U.S. District Judge William Alsup (who has since retired) issued a mixed ruling that became pivotal to the case's resolution. Alsup found that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books does not inherently violate copyright law and constitutes fair use. However, he also determined that Anthropic had wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites—a distinction that exposed the company to liability despite the legality of the training practice itself. Alsup issued preliminary approval of the settlement last September in San Francisco federal court.

In her Monday ruling, Judge Martínez-Olguín characterized the settlement as providing "meaningful relief" to affected authors and publishers. Anthropic's deputy general counsel, Aparna Sridhar, stated in a written statement that the company was "pleased that more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment" and that the company looked forward to "bringing this matter to a close." Sridhar also highlighted Alsup's ruling as establishing that "training AI on books is fair use under copyright law."

Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson called the settlement "the largest known copyright recovery in history" and said the class looked forward to receiving distributions as promptly as possible. The settlement is the first major resolution among dozens of AI copyright lawsuits still working their way through courts, suggesting it may influence the trajectory and scale of future settlements in this emerging category of litigation.

This settlement represents a watershed moment for AI copyright liability. While U.S. District Judge William Alsup's earlier ruling protected the core practice of training AI models on copyrighted text—classifying it as fair use—his mixed decision also flagged a critical distinction: the legality of the training method depends on how the company acquired the training data in the first place. Anthropic's use of pirated copies obtained from pirate websites fell outside that protection, leaving the company exposed to damages.

The $1.5 billion（約2400億円） settlement, the first major recovery in what plaintiff counsel described as a class-action addressing copyright infringement at scale, signals that AI companies cannot simply treat pirated content as a cost-effective shortcut to assembling training datasets. The fact that over 91% of affected authors and publishers have claimed their shares suggests broad awareness and participation in the recovery process. With dozens of similar AI copyright lawsuits still pending in courts, this precedent—that fair use may protect the training act itself but not the method of data acquisition—is likely to shape how future defendants negotiate settlements and how courts weigh comparable claims.

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