Anthropic settles AI copyright lawsuit brought by authors
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Occurred: 2022-2025
Page published: September 2025
Anthropic reached a settlement to pay USD 1.5 billion to authors in a landmark copyright lawsuit over its use of pirated books to train its AI model Claude, depriving them of income.
What happened
What happened
AI company Anthropic settled a class-action lawsuit brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Kirk Wallace Johnson and Charles Graeber, who accused the company of using unauthorised copies of approximately 500,000 books obtained from pirate libraries such as LibGen and PiLiMi (Pirate Library Mirror) to train its language model Claude.
The settlement agreement requires Anthropic to pay USD 1.5 billion (USD 3,000 per book) and destroy the pirated content it used. It does not affect claims regarding AI outputs or future conduct.
The lawsuit arose after a court ruling found Anthropic’s use of purchased books constituted fair use, but ruled that the use of pirated works was infringing and not protected by fair use, describing piracy of copyrighted works as "inherently, irredeemably infringing."
The settlement, which requires the approval of US District Judge William Alsup, is the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history.
Why it happened
Why it happened
Anthropic’s legal defense in the AI copyright lawsuit centered on the argument that its use of copyrighted materials to train its AI model Claude constituted "fair use" under U.S. copyright law.
Specifically, Anthropic contended that digitising books it lawfully purchased and using those digital copies for machine learning was highly transformative and essential for competitive AI development.
The company argued that its training approach was analogous to human reading and learning, turning the content into something fundamentally different rather than replicating the originals.
However, Anthropic acknowledged it had also used over seven million digital copies of books obtained from pirate websites.
What it means
What it means
The settlement offers authors unprecedented compensation and recognition of harms from the unauthorised use of their works to train AI models, and sets a financial and legal precedent for handling copyrighted content.
It signals that companies using third-party content to train their models must seriously consider licensing copyrighted materials - or face costly litigation.
Fair use
Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder.
Source: Wikipedia 🔗
System 🤖
System 🤖
Developer: Anthropic
Country: USA
Sector: Media/entertainment/sports/arts
Purpose: Multi-purpose
Technology: Generative AI; Machine learning
Issue: Copyright
Regulation ⚖️
Regulation ⚖️
Legal, regulatory 👩🏼⚖️
Legal, regulatory 👩🏼⚖️
Incident no: AIAAIC2021
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