法官批准Anthropic 15亿美元书籍盗版集体诉讼和解

A federal judge has signed off on Anthropic’s $1. 5 billion class action settlement with authors who accused the company of training its AI models on copyrighted books, as reported earlier by Reuters. In an order on Monday, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín writes that the settlement will provide “meaningful relief,” offering authors around $3,000 for each book allegedly pirated by Anthropic.

Anthropic’s $1. 5 billion book piracy settlement approved by judge The $3,000 per book payment could be the ‘largest known copyright recovery in history. ’ The $3,000 per book payment could be the ‘largest known copyright recovery in history. ’ The $1. 5 billion settlement is the “largest known copyright recovery in history,” according to the law firm representing the plaintiffs.

A group of authors — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson — first filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic in 2024. While the now-retired Judge William Alsup granted Anthropic a partial victory last year, he approved a separate class action lawsuit claiming the company engaged in the “Napster-style downloading of millions of works.

” Anthropic agreed to a $1. 5 billion settlement in September 2025, to which Judge Alsup later granted preliminary approval. “We are pleased that more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment,” Anthropic general counsel Aparna Sridhar tells Reuters.

“We’re looking forward to bringing this matter to a close. ” Anthropic is still facing copyright lawsuits from Chicken Soup for the Soul and several other authors who argue that $3,000 per book isn’t enough. Most Popular - The FCC is planning to retroactively ban disguised DJI gadgets - The Light Flip is a minimalist flip phone with a point to prove - China delivers a one-two punch to America’s AI dominance - Garmin’s new screen-free fitness tracker doesn’t require a subscription - Apple’s rumored ‘Upgrade’ program brings lease-to-own pricing for iPhones, Macs, and iPads

Anthropic can finally start cutting checks to a group of authors and book publishers that sued the AI lab over copyright infringement. A federal judge gave final approval Monday of Anthropic’s landmark $1. 5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit, Reuters reported.

Judge William Alsup of the U. S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary approval of 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 deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them. While the settlement is believed to be the largest in the history of U. S. copyright law, many authors and creators still don’t view it as a win.

That’s because of how the legal question 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 didn’t excuse how Anthropic obtained the books in the first place.

Anthropic had built its training library from two sources: books it purchased and scanned (fine), and books it downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Alsup found the second method illegal on its own terms and said that piracy question could go to trial; Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon after to avoid a trial and whatever damages a jury might have awarded.

While the final approval closes out this case, it doesn’t settle the legal question industrywide because Alsup’s ruling was a single district court decision, and Anthropic’s decision to settle means the case will never reach an appeals court to become binding precedent.

Other judges are still free to reach their own conclusions on their own facts, which is exactly what’s playing out elsewhere. There is still a string of copyright lawsuits against companies such as Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI over whether it’s legal to train AI models on copyrighted works.

Just last week, a group of publishers and authors, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S. C. R. I. B. E. filed a class action lawsuit against Google over accusations that the company used their copyrighted works to train its AI platform, Gemini.