Anthropic's record-breaking $1.5 billion settlement for an AI copyright lawsuit filed by writers has been approved by a federal judge in San Francisco. The company was sued by a group of authors in 2024, who accused Anthropic of using pirated copies of their work to train its Claude large language models.

William Alsup, the case's original judge, ruled that Anthropic's use of the writers' work to train Claude counted as fair use. At the same time, he found that the company infringed their copyright when it stored 7 million pirated books to a central library. Alsup rejected the deal in September last year over concerns that it was shoving the terms "down the throat of authors."

US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, who took over the case after Alsup retired, has now approved the settlement terms. The settlement covers more than 480,000 works. Authors are expected to get approximately $3,000 per affected work, while Anthropic is required to destroy the pirated copies of their books. Some plaintiffs, however, found the payout too low and opted out to file separate lawsuits.