Published: July 22, 2026 at 8:14 am
A $1.5 billion settlement against AI giant Anthropic has been approved by a US judge.
Authors and publishers are set for payouts after judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín certified the largest ever copyright lawsuit.
However the settlement recognised that Anthropic, maker of generative AI chatbot Claude, is free to train its models on works it has legally acquired as this was judged to be fair use.
The class action of Bartz et al vs. Anthropic, filed in 2024, pertained to Anthropic training its AI models on content it had not purchased.
Writers accused Anthropic of illegally downloading and storing millions of copyrighted books from pirate sites such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.