Anthropic Copyright Settlement: Some Things We’ve Learned

A quick refresher on the largest copyright recovery in history (for a lot more detail and context, see the post I wrote last year): In 2024, a group of authors filed a copyright infringement class action lawsuit against AI company Anthropic over its creation of an enormous library of digitized books to train its Claude chatbot. In addition to buying and scanning physical books, Anthropic also downloaded millions of works that had been illegally uploaded to pirate sites—all without permission from the works’ creators. In 2025, the judge in the case ruled that Anthropic’s digitization and training on legally acquired physical books was fair use, as Anthropic claimed—but its use of pirated works was a massive infringement of copyright that justified a trial. Facing potentially catastrophic payouts for hundreds of thousands of infringed works (under US copyright law, the maximum award of statutory damages for willful infringement is $150,000 per work), Anthropic chose to settle, agreeing…

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