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Anthropic to pay $1.5bn to authors in AI copyright case settlement
Tech giant Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5bn to settle a lawsuit that was brought against the company by three authors, after it downloaded pirated versions of books to train its AI model. It is estimated that Anthropic will pay $3,000 for each piece of copyrighted work that was pirated.
The suit – Bartz v Anthropic – was first filed on 19th August 2024 by three authors and included broad class action copyright claims against Anthropic over AI training. On 23rd June, Judge Alsup of the District Court for the Northern District of California issued an order indicating that copyright infringement claims related to Anthropic’s mass copying of books from illegal shadow libraries could move forward to trial, and on 17th July, he certified the class for these piracy claims, which by class definition includes publishers as well as authors.
However, on 25th August this year, the parties jointly submitted a statement of potential settlement to the court. The proposed settlement agreement will be considered by Alsup at a preliminary approval hearing today (8th September). Alsup must approve the entire proposed settlement before it can take effect, and additional details of the settlement will be fleshed out under the court’s supervision.
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Maria A Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said: "The Association of American Publishers (AAP) endorses the proposed settlement of the Bartz v Anthropic class action, through which Anthropic will pay at least $1.5bn to resolve copyright infringement claims regarding its mass piracy of books and destroy works that it torrented or downloaded from the pirated LibGen or PiLiMi datasets. The proposed settlement will drive home the important message to all artificial intelligence (AI) companies that copying books from shadow libraries or other pirate sources to use as the building blocks for their businesses has serious consequences.
"AAP and publishers across the country have been monitoring the Bartz case carefully since its inception. Following the Court’s class certification on 17th July 2025, we actively engaged through counsel to assist and support this historically large settlement. We know that our counterparts at the Authors Guild have done the same, and we believe that the proposed settlement advances the common goal of publishers and authors to combat piracy.
"We look forward to supporting next steps in the weeks ahead."
