Summary:<\/p>\n
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin grants final approval A federal judge in San Francisco on July 20 signed off on artificial intelligence company Anthropic\u2019s landmark $1.5 billion settlement<\/a> of a class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who accused it of misusing their books to train its AI chatbot<\/a> Claude.\n<\/p>\n U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted final approval of the settlement, the largest known settlement of a U.S. copyright case, rejecting arguments that it was too small.<\/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.\n<\/p>\n Now-retired Judge William Alsup initially approved the deal last September.\n<\/p>\n \u201cWe reached this settlement in 2025, after the court\u2019s landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use<\/a> under copyright law \u2014 which remains the law today,\u201d Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement.<\/p>\n The authors\u2019 lead attorney, Justin Nelson, welcomed what he called a \u201chistoric settlement.\u201d\n<\/p>\n The writers sued Anthropic in 2024, arguing that the company, which is backed by \u2060Amazon<\/a> and Alphabet<\/a> , used pirated versions of their books without permission to teach Claude to respond to human prompts.\n<\/p>\n Alsup ruled last June that Anthropic made fair \u2060use of the authors\u2019 work to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a \u201ccentral library\u201d that would not necessarily be used for AI training.\n<\/p>\n A trial was scheduled to begin last December \u2060to determine how much Anthropic owed for the alleged piracy, with potential damages running into the hundreds of billions of dollars.\n<\/p>\n The settlement spurred objections from some authors who argued it was not large enough, overcompensated the plaintiffs\u2019 attorneys or wrongly excluded some copyright owners.\n<\/p>\n Judge Martinez-Olguin overruled those objections in her ruling on July 20. The judge said that complaints about the settlement\u2019s size were \u201cnot grounded in a realistic assessment of the overall risks and rewards of a trial,\u201d and awarded the attorneys more than $101 million of the $187.5 million they requested in fees.\n<\/p>\n Some authors and publishers opted out of the settlement and have filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic that are still ongoing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Summary: U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin grants final approval Anthropic settles class action for $1.5 billion Attorneys awarded…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1604,1483,321,53,10168,58165,24765,21285],"class_list":["post-113502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-ai-chatbot","tag-alphabet","tag-amazon","tag-anthropic","tag-class-action-lawsuit","tag-copyright-trademark-law","tag-fair-use","tag-settlement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAnthropic<\/a> settles class action for $1.5 billion
\nAttorneys awarded over $101 million in fees<\/p>\n