Tuesday, 4 November 2025
U.S.-based artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who accused the company of using their books to train its Claude chatbot without permission. The settlement, covering around 500,000 works, would compensate authors with an average of about $3,000 per book. It now awaits approval from a federal court in San Francisco, according to Reuters.
The agreement, first announced in August without details, is expected to be the largest publicly disclosed copyright enforcement settlement involving generative AI to date. Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing the case, scheduled a hearing for Monday to review the terms.
The lawsuit was filed last year by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. They argued that Anthropic had illegally used millions of books to train its Claude system. In June, Judge Alsup ruled that while Anthropic could use certain materials for training, the company infringed copyright by placing more than seven million books into a central repository not intended solely for training purposes.
The trial had been scheduled for December, but by agreeing to settle out of court Anthropic has avoided what could have been an even more costly judgment.
The case is part of a wider wave of litigation against technology companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta, which face lawsuits over the use of copyrighted content to train generative AI systems. These systems, which generate text or images based on large datasets, have surged in prominence since OpenAI’s ChatGPT drew global attention in late 2022.
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, launched its Claude chatbot in 2023. The company has attracted investment from major backers including Amazon and Alphabet. This week, it was valued at $183 billion following a new funding round.
