Federal judge seeks more details on Anthropic's $1.5 billion author settlement
A federal judge in San Francisco has postponed final approval of Claude maker Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors who sued over copyright infringement. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin asked for additional information on lawyer fees and payments to lead plaintiffs during Thursday's hearing.
The case represents the largest known copyright settlement in U.S. history. A now-retired judge initially approved the deal last September.
What the lawsuit covers
Authors filed the lawsuit in 2024, claiming Anthropic used pirated versions of their books without permission to train Claude. The settlement covers more than 480,000 works, with authors and other copyright holders filing claims on over 92% of them.
Last June, a judge ruled that Anthropic made fair use of the authors' work for training purposes. However, the judge found the company violated copyright law by storing more than 7 million pirated books in a "central library" not necessarily used for AI training.
Without the settlement, a trial scheduled for December would have determined damages that could have reached hundreds of billions of dollars.
Ongoing objections and separate lawsuits
Some authors have challenged the settlement, arguing it undercompensates them or gives too much to their lawyers. Others say it wrongly excludes certain copyright owners.
More than 25 writers, including Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, opted out of the settlement entirely. They filed a new lawsuit against Anthropic in California this week.
Multiple other copyright infringement cases against Anthropic remain pending. The company is backed by Amazon and Alphabet.
For writers navigating AI tools, this case illustrates the legal and financial stakes around how companies use published work to train AI systems.
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