US judge approves Anthropic's $1.5 bil. settlement of copyright lawsuit

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 accused it of misusing their books to train its AI chatbot Claude.

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.

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.

Now-retired Judge William Alsup initially approved the deal last September.

"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," Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement.

"We are pleased that more than 91 percent of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment, and we're l ...