A federal judge in San Francisco has approved a $1.5 billion class-action settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic, resolving claims by a class of more than 300,000 writers who alleged that Anthropic used millions of digitized copyrighted books to train the large language models behind its Claude chatbot without consent or compensation.
Legal framing
According to reporting on the approval, the court did not find it illegal for Anthropic to train its AI models on authors’ copyrighted works so long as the company paid for the books it used. Anthropic Deputy General Counsel Aparna Sridhar said: “Training AI on books is fair use under copyright law,” adding that “more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment, and we’re looking forward to bringing this matter to a close.” The court’s ruling that AI training itself can constitute fair use — coupled with liability tied to how the underlying books were obtained — is expected to shape future generative-AI copyright litigation, including a Meta case last year involving Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman that Meta won on evidentiary grounds.
Per-author payout and author reactions
Class member and author Charles Graeber said he is entitled to around $3,100 in compensation for each of two of his books that were used to train Claude, telling NPR: “I was proud to be part of a group that showed that a ragtag bunch of authors joined later by publishers could actually hold together as a class, face a Goliath like Anthropic and get a meaningful number out of them,” while also noting the personal cost of the litigation: “A lot of travel, a lot of discussion about what to do and how to proceed and a lot of jobs passed up. I’m much poorer for this settlement, ironically.” Lead plaintiff Andrea Bartz said: “The algorithm is being used to essentially try to put us out of a job,” and expressed hope the case is “the first of many steps that will create a more fair environment for creatives in the era of AI.”
Licensing outlook
Authors Guild policy director Umair Kazi framed the ruling as an argument for a licensing market: “Licensing is a way to make sure that training happens legally. Not only that, licensing also enables rights holders to restrict how their works show up in AI chatbot outputs. Maybe you license just for the training, but you don’t want the model churning out summaries or other kinds of derivative works – sequels and the likes. Because the big AI companies are all in litigation over training, licensing deals are still rare.”
Source: NPR