One of the largest copyright lawsuits in the United States has ended in a record-breaking settlement. Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors and publishers after a judge ruled that it had illegally downloaded and archived millions of copyrighted books. The New York Times called the settlement the largest ever in the history of copyright infringement cases. Each author involved will receive about $3 per work, covering nearly 500 authors.
The lawsuit was initiated by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of plagiarizing their books to develop the Claude artificial intelligence model.
“This is a historic precedent, far larger than any other similar case before it, and the first of its kind in the AI era,” said the plaintiffs’ attorney, Justin Nelson. While the amount of the damages is record-breaking, it remains small compared to the company’s own capital. Just recently, Anthropic announced a new investment deal of $13 billion, bringing the total funds raised since its founding in 2021 to more than $27 billion. The agreement followed a June ruling by federal judge William Alsup, who acknowledged that using legally purchased books to train AI models could be considered “fair use” and that the technology was “deeply transformative.”
But the court also found that Anthropic had downloaded millions of books from pirate libraries like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. According to the ruling, the company’s executives knew that these platforms contained illegal material, but chose this route to avoid the “legal and commercial difficulties” of buying the books, as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei himself admitted in court documents. The case is seen as a turning point for the relationship between the publishing industry and artificial intelligence companies, setting new precedents for how copyright is handled in the digital age.