A US federal judge has given final approval to a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and a group of authors who accused the AI company of training its Claude chatbot on pirated copies of their books, bringing the first major generative AI copyright lawsuit in the United States to a close. The case was widely watched as a test of how courts would handle claims that AI firms built their models using unlicensed copyrighted material, and the scale of the payout marks it as the largest settlement of its kind to date in the AI industry.

The lawsuit, brought by authors in California federal court, centred on claims that Anthropic obtained and used pirated e-books from unauthorised online sources to train its language models, even as the company separately argued that training on lawfully acquired books should be considered fair use. Under the settlement, Anthropic will compensate authors and rights holders for a large number of affected works, with the case seen as a template for how similar disputes involving other AI developers may ultimately be resolved.