Anthropic has agreed to pay US$1.5 billion to settle claims that it used pirated, copyrighted books to train its generative AI software.
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The parties filed the proposed settlement today after having announced a settlement in principle in August 2025.
In August 2024, book authors filed a class action in the US District Court for the Northern District of California that alleged that Anthropic’s Claude generative AI model was trained on pirated versions of their copyrighted books without consent.
In June 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s use of books to train its AI qualified as fair use under US copyright law. However, Alsup found that the company’s alleged use of pirated works did not.
According to the motion for preliminary approval of the class settlement, “If approved, this landmark settlement will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, larger than any other copyright class action settlement or any individual copyright case litigated to final judgment.”
Plaintiffs’ counsel said the settlement “will set a precedent of AI companies paying for their use of alleged pirated websites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.”
With approximately 500,000 works in the class, each one will recover about US$3,000. Additionally, Anthropic agreed to destroy its Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) datasets. The plaintiffs had alleged that Anthropic had collected pirated, copyrighted books from those datasets without the authors’ consent.
Anthropic also received a “past release” for conduct up to 25 August 2025, according to the proposed settlement.
However, “[c]laims arising out of conduct after August 25, 2025 won’t be released by the Settlement, nor will any claims (past or future) arising out of allegedly infringing outputs from Anthropic’s AI models.”
Counsel to Anthropic
Cooley
Partners Kathleen Hartnett in San Francisco and Ephraim McDowell are assisted by Alexander Kasner
Latham & Watkins
Partners Andrew Gass and Joseph Wetzel in San Francisco
Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer
Partner Angel Tang Nakamura, counsel Oscar Ramallo in Los Angeles, and counsel Assad Rajani in Palo Alto, California are assisted by Allyson Myers
Lex Lumina
Partner Mark Alan Lemley in Los Angeles
Counsel to the plaintiffs
Susman Godfrey
Partners Jordan Connors in Seattle, Rohit Nath in Los Angeles, Justin A. Nelson and in Houston are assisted by Collin Fredricks
Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein
Partners Rachel Geman in New York and Reilly Stoler in San Francisco are assisted by Wesley Dozier, Anna Freymann, Danna Elmasry and Jacob Miller
Cowan Debaets Abrahams & Sheppard
Partner Scott Sholder in New York is assisted by CeCe Cole