Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5 billion to authors whose work trained AI in priciest copyright settlement in U.S. history

CHONGQING, CHINA - DECEMBER 29: In this photo illustration, a person holds a smartphone displaying the logo of “Claude,” an AI language model by Anthropic, with the company’s logo visible in the background, illustrating the rapid development and adoption of generative AI technologies, on December 29, 2024 in Chongqing, China. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a cornerstone of China’s strategic ambitions, with the government aiming to establish the country as a global leader in AI by 2030.

As reported by the New York Times, AI company Anthropic has agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement in a groundbreaking copyright lawsuit involving some 500,000 authors. Anthropic illegally downloaded the authors' books and used them to train its AI model. The total settlement for this case is the largest for any copyright case in U.S. history, although the payout to each affected author is only $3,000.

The lawsuit, filed in August 2024, accused Anthropic of benefiting from pirated copyrighted books, stating, "An essential component of Anthropic’s business model—and its flagship 'Claude' family of large language models (or “LLMs”)—is the largescale theft of copyrighted works."