Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement receives final approval

A federal judge has given final approval to AI company Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement stemming from copyright infringement claims. The agreement resolves a class-action lawsuit filed by a group of authors and publishers against the artificial intelligence lab.

The payout will distribute $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, to be shared among the authors and publishers holding rights. While believed to be the largest settlement in U.S. copyright law history, many creators do not view the outcome as a complete victory.

The core legal issue addressed in the ruling concerned the use of copyrighted material for AI training. The judge previously sided with Anthropic, determining that training an AI model on copyrighted text constitutes "fair use." This determination is widely seen as a turning point for the AI industry, establishing a precedent for how such practices are addressed.

However, while the training itself was deemed fair use, the methods Anthropic employed to obtain and store its training data, which included millions of copyrighted books, remained a point of contention and are addressed within the settlement terms.