Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by book authors who accused the company of using pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot, Claude.

If approved by a San Francisco federal judge on Monday, the deal would mark a landmark moment in ongoing copyright disputes between AI developers and creative professionals, including writers, artists and publishers.

Under the settlement, Anthropic will pay authors and publishers about $3,000 per book for an estimated 500,000 works. It is believed to be the largest copyright payout ever secured.

“This is the first of its kind in the AI era,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors.

The case was originally filed last year by thriller writer Andrea Bartz and nonfiction authors Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, later expanding to cover a wider class of authors and publishers.

Court records show Anthropic downloaded more than 7 million books from pirate sites including Books3, Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. A federal judge previously ruled that while training AI on copyrighted books may qualify as “fair use,” the company illegally obtained the material.

Nepal blocks Facebook, X, YouTube Over failure to register with govt

As part of the settlement, Anthropic has agreed to destroy the pirated book files.

The Authors Guild welcomed the outcome, calling it a “strong message to the AI industry” about the risks of exploiting creative works without permission.

The agreement could influence ongoing lawsuits against OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and other AI firms.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, is valued at $183 billion and expects $5 billion in sales this year, though it has yet to turn a profit.

Source: Agency