Anthropic’s landmark $1.5B copyright settlement is approved

Anthropic can finally start cutting checks to a group of authors and book publishers who have sued the AI ​​lab for copyright infringement. A federal judge on Monday gave final approval to Anthropic’s historic $1.5 billion settlement in a copyright class action lawsuit. Reuters reported this.

Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California gave preliminary approval to the settlement last year after ruling that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books.

Alsup has since retired and Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on the settlement on Monday.

The payout will provide $3,000 per work for an estimated 500,000 works, distributed among the authors and publishers who own the rights to them. Although the settlement is believed to be the largest in U.S. copyright history, many authors and creators still don’t consider it a victory.

That’s because of the way the legal issue was resolved. Alsup sided with Anthropic on the core issue. He ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text counts as fair use – a decision widely seen as a turning point for the AI ​​industry. But the ruling did not excuse the way Anthropic obtained the books in the first place. Anthropic had built its training library from two sources: books it had purchased and scanned (fine), and books it had downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Alsup found the second method illegal on its own terms and said the piracy issue could end up in court; Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon afterward to avoid a trial and any damages a jury might have awarded.

While the final approval concludes this case, it does not resolve the industry-wide legal issue because Alsup’s ruling was a single district court decision, and Anthropic’s decision to settle means the case will never reach an appellate court to become a binding precedent.

Other judges are still free to draw their own conclusions based on their own facts, and that is exactly what is happening elsewhere. There are still a series of copyright lawsuits against companies like Google, Meta, Midjourney and OpenAI over whether it is legal to train AI models on copyrighted works. Last week, a group of publishers and authors including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow and SCRIBE filed a class action lawsuit against Google over allegations that the company used their copyrighted works to train its AI platform, Gemini.