Bloomsbury, the publisher behind Harry Potter, JK Rowling, Sarah J Maas and Susanna Clarke, is set to receive a multimillion-pound payout as part of a $1.5bn copyright settlement between AI firm Anthropic and thousands of authors and publishers. The case centres on Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its Claude chatbots without permission, a practice at the heart of a wider legal battle over whether AI firms can rely on "fair use" or must pay creators for the material used to build their systems.

Bloomsbury has 14,087 titles listed in the settlement, with compensation proposed at roughly $3,000 per title, and expects payments in instalments from later this financial year, split with its authors. After roughly 10% is deducted for legal and other costs, Bloomsbury and the affected authors are each expected to receive about $19m (£14m). The lawsuit was brought by novelist Andrea Bartz and two others in 2024, covering 482,000 works, of which 91% have now been claimed; a US judge called the deal "meaningful relief", and the authors' lawyer described it as the largest known copyright recovery in history. It is the first major settlement among numerous AI copyright cases still working through US courts.