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

A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday (July 20) 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. The writers sued Anthropic in 2024, arguing that the company, which is backed by ⁠Amazon and Alphabet, used pirated versions of their books without permission to teach Claude to respond to human prompts. Alsup ruled last June ​that Anthropic made fair ⁠use of the authors' work to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a "central library" ​that would not necessarily be used for AI training.