A federal judge has given final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit brought by authors and book publishers, clearing the way for payouts to begin. The case centred on Anthropic's practice of downloading and storing millions of copyrighted books to train its AI models, and the settlement is believed to be the largest in the history of US copyright law, marking a significant moment for the wider AI industry as it grapples with similar legal challenges elsewhere.

Under the deal, rights holders will receive $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works. Judge William Alsup, who has since retired, had ruled that training AI on copyrighted text constitutes fair use, but found that Anthropic's use of pirated sources such as Library Genesis was unlawful, prompting the settlement rather than a trial; Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin has now signed off on the final approval. Because the case was settled rather than appealed, the ruling sets no binding industry-wide precedent, and similar copyright disputes continue against companies including Google, Meta, Midjourney and OpenAI, with publishers recently suing Google over its Gemini AI training practices.