By Blake Brittain <\/p>\n
July 20 (Reuters) – A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday signed off on artificial intelligence company Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who \u200caccused it of misusing their books to train its AI chatbot Claude. <\/p>\n
U.S. District Judge Araceli \u200cMartinez-Olguin granted final approval of the settlement, the largest known settlement of a U.S. copyright case, rejecting arguments that it was too \u200bsmall. <\/p>\n
The case is one of dozens brought by copyright owners including authors and news outlets against tech companies over the training of their large language models, and the first major U.S. case to settle. <\/p>\n
Now-retired Judge William Alsup initially approved the deal last September. <\/p>\n
“We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court’s landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair \u200cuse under copyright law \u2014 which remains the \u2060law today,” Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement. <\/p>\n
“We are pleased that more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed \u2060their share of the payment, and we’re looking forward to bringing this matter to a close.” <\/p>\n
The authors’ lead attorney, Justin Nelson, welcomed what he called a “historic settlement.” <\/p>\n
“It is the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to \u200bmaking \u200bdistributions to the Class as promptly as possible,” Nelson said \u200bin a statement, referring to payments to \u200cauthors covered by the settlement. <\/p>\n
The writers sued Anthropic in 2024, arguing that the company, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet , used pirated versions of their books without permission to teach Claude to respond to human prompts. <\/p>\n