U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted final approval for the settlement, marking it as the largest known resolution in a U.S. copyright case, dismissing claims that the amount was insufficient.
This case is among many by copyright holders, including authors and news organizations, against tech firms over the training of large language models, and it is the first major U.S. case to reach a settlement.
The initial approval came from now-retired Judge William Alsup last September.
“We finalized this settlement in 2025, following the court’s groundbreaking decision that training AI on books constitutes fair use under copyright legislation — a stance that still stands,” stated Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic’s deputy general counsel.
“We are pleased that over 91% of authors and publishers involved in the settlement have claimed their share of the compensation, and we look forward to concluding this matter.”
Justin Nelson, the lead attorney for the authors, hailed what he termed a “historic settlement.”
“This represents the largest known recovery in copyright history. We eagerly anticipate making distributions to the Class as soon as possible,” Nelson commented in a statement, regarding payments to the authors encompassed by the settlement.
The writers took legal action against Anthropic in 2024, contending that the company, supported by Amazon and Alphabet, used unauthorized versions of their books to instruct Claude in responding to human inquiries.
Alsup decided last June that Anthropic was justified in using the authors’ work to train Claude, but acknowledged that the company breached their rights by saving over 7 million pirated books in a “central library” that may not necessarily be utilized for AI training.
A trial was set to commence last December to assess the damages owed by Anthropic for the alleged piracy, with potential compensation reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The settlement faced objections from some authors who claimed it was insufficient, excessively compensated the plaintiffs’ attorneys, or unjustly excluded certain copyright holders.
Judge Martinez-Olguin dismissed those objections in her ruling on Monday, arguing that complaints regarding the settlement’s value were “not based on a realistic evaluation of the overall risks and rewards of a trial,” and granted the attorneys more than $101 million of the $187.5 million they sought in fees.
Some authors and publishers chose to opt out of the settlement and have initiated separate lawsuits against Anthropic that are still ongoing.
