Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion in landmark copyright settlement over pirated book library

A U.S. federal judge has granted final approval of Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement in a class action lawsuit filed by authors for copyright infringement. According to Reuters, while the court ruled that training AI on books constitutes fair use under copyright law, it was Anthropic's retention of 7 million pirated books in a central library that violated the rights of authors and their publishers.

This is reportedly the largest payout in a copyright case to date and the first settlement among the many ongoing infringement cases against AI companies.

Payout Details and Fair Use Ruling

Although the settlement sum appears massive, the large number of works and authors involved means the payout amounts to just over $200 per title. The ruling also affirmed that AI firms' use of existing works to train their models is fair use—a point many are contesting.

"We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court's landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law—which remains the law today," said Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar. "We are pleased that more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment, and we're looking forward to bringing this matter to a close."

As a result, some groups have opted out of the settlement and filed separate complaints against the AI firm.

Broader Implications for AI Companies

Nevertheless, this is a landmark win for copyright holders, especially against other AI tech companies that have been scraping pirated content to train their models. This includes:

• Nvidia: Allegedly used scripts in its NeMo Framework specifically designed for illegally downloading books.
• Meta: Reportedly torrented 82TB of pirated books for AI training. Meta argued that its framework also has "non-infringing uses," but the court said the issue was not the entire system but specific tools within it. Meta also claimed that its use of pirated material was legal as long as it did not seed content.

A Major Step Forward

Copyright infringement is one of the major issues facing AI tools today, especially as many creators believe these models were trained on stolen data. Anthropic's landmark settlement is a first major win for authors and publishers—though not exactly what some wanted, given that the settlement is small relative to the number of pirated books and that AI training is still considered fair use.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds.

Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.