A federal judge finalized Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement, approving payouts of $3,000 per work to roughly 500,000 authors and publishers. Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin’s decision resolved a lawsuit alleging Anthropic illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books from pirate sites, though a prior ruling in the case found that AI training on copyrighted text can constitute fair use. The settlement closes this particular case but leaves the broader legal question of copyright infringement in AI training unresolved, with cases against Google, Meta, and OpenAI still pending.
