Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over books used to train Claude
A federal judge has approved the 1.5 billion dollar class-action settlement between Anthropic and the authors whose books were pirated to train Claude, working out at roughly 3,000 dollars a book across more than 482,000 titles, about 91 percent of which have now been claimed. Plaintiff counsel calls it the largest copyright recovery on record, and it is the first major resolution among dozens of AI copyright suits still moving through the courts. The shape of the ruling matters more than the number. Judge Alsup had already found last summer that training on copyrighted books is fair use, and that what Anthropic did wrong was acquire millions of them from pirate sites -- a split Anthropic's own deputy general counsel has been careful to point at. So the settlement prices the acquisition, not the training.
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