US judge approves Anthropic's $1.5 billion（約2400億円） copyright settlement

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on Anthropic's $1.5 billion（約2400億円） settlement of a copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors. The company, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, faced allegations that it used pirated versions of the authors' books without permission to train Claude, its AI chatbot.

The legal path to the settlement began when writers sued Anthropic in 2024. The case proceeded to an earlier ruling by now-retired Judge William Alsup in June, who found that Anthropic had made fair use of the authors' work in the course of training Claude—a determination that could have shielded the company entirely. However, Alsup also identified a violation: Anthropic had saved more than 7 million pirated books to a "central library" that was not necessarily intended for AI training. That distinction tipped the scales toward liability. A trial had been scheduled to begin in December to determine damages, with potential claims running into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

The settlement now avoids that trial. Judge Martinez-Olguin's approval follows an initial greenlight from Judge Alsup last September. Authors and other copyright holders filed claims covering over 92% of the more than 480,000 works included in the settlement, according to an attorney for the authors who spoke during a court hearing. However, the resolution is not universal. Some authors and publishers have objected to the terms, arguing that the settlement is too small, that it overcompensates the plaintiffs' attorneys, or that it wrongly excludes certain copyright owners. Those dissenting parties have opted out and filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic that remain pending.

The settlement stands as the first major U.S. copyright case against an AI company to reach resolution, and it is the largest known settlement in U.S. copyright history. However, it is only one resolution in what the body describes as dozens of copyright lawsuits brought by copyright owners—including authors and news outlets—against tech companies over the training of their large language models.

The settlement represents a watershed moment in the copyright disputes that have engulfed the AI industry. Judge Alsup's earlier June ruling had already clarified a key tension: while AI companies may have a fair use defense for using copyrighted material during training, the deliberate storage of millions of pirated books in a central repository crossed an additional legal line. That distinction between training and unauthorized retention became the basis for settlement negotiations.

The size of the settlement—$1.5 billion（約2400億円）—must be read against the counterfactual: a trial was scheduled to begin in December with potential damages claimed in the hundreds of billions of dollars. For Anthropic (backed by Amazon and Alphabet), the settlement offered certainty and an exit from escalating litigation risk. For authors, the settlement also came with a trade-off. Coverage is broad—claims on over 92% of the works in the pool—but some copyright holders have publicly objected to the terms, arguing the award is too small or that it overcompensates the plaintiffs' attorneys. Those dissenters have chosen to pursue their own lawsuits, signaling that the copyright question is not fully resolved across the industry.

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