Writers Will Get Less Than Expected From Anthropic Settlement
A $1.5 billion class action settlement with artificial intelligence company Anthropic promised writers around $5,000 per title for copyrighted works used to train its Claude chatbot. The actual payout will be significantly smaller.
The settlement, known as Bartz v. Anthropic, compensates authors whose books were scraped-copied without permission-to feed Anthropic's AI system. But as more writers filed claims, the per-title amount dropped to just under $3,000, according to writer Elizabeth Benedict on her Substack newsletter.
Publishers and literary agents will take their cuts, reducing what writers actually receive. A used Tesla, as some joked about affording, is now out of reach.
The timeline has also slipped. The Authors Guild now expects disbursements in "late fall at the earliest," pushing back the original May estimate.
The Money Versus the Scale
Anthropic announced plans to go public with a possible valuation of $1 trillion. The $1.5 billion settlement amounts to a fraction of that value-roughly a 0.15 percent tip for the thousands of writers whose work made Claude functional.
When asked about payment timing, Claude itself offered no help: the chatbot directed inquiries to "the official communication from the settlement administrator or legal counsel managing the case."
Similar Battles Ahead
The Authors Guild and celebrity writers including Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, and Stephen King have sued OpenAI, Anthropic's main competitor, for copyright infringement. Additional settlements may follow the same pattern.
The irony runs deep. Herman Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne before "Moby-Dick" was published: "Dollars damn me." The novel never sold well during his lifetime. Melville died in relative obscurity and financial difficulty.
Writers didn't enter the profession expecting wealth. As one tech lawyer in San Francisco put it, the settlement is pocket change to Anthropic-a rounding error on the way to a trillion-dollar valuation.
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