AI Giant Anthropic Reaches Record $1.5B Deal Over Copyright Dispute

Anthropic, one of the leading artificial intelligence companies, has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by a group of authors who claimed the platform illegally used pirated books to train its large-language models. If approved, the payout would mark the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history, with plaintiffs pointing to more than 500,000 works at issue. The proposed deal translates to $3,000 per work, though the figure could rise if more titles are added. While a federal judge previously ruled that Anthropic’s model training qualified as “fair use,” the downloading of pirated material did not. The settlement could influence ongoing lawsuits against other AI platforms, including cases involving bestselling authors like John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult.