Authors and publishers clash over $1.5B Anthropic deal

Authors whose books ended up in Anthropic’s pirated training library are now arguing with their own publishers over who gets paid, The New York Times reported on September 5. A US judge approved the $1.5 billion settlement over books used to train Claude in July. The fight is happening in the claims stage, which is running now.

The settlement counts money by the book. It pays about $3,000 per work for roughly 500,000 works, and the class covers owners of books in the LibGen and PiLiMi copies Anthropic downloaded. TechCrunch described the same pool as around half a million writers eligible for at least $3,000 each. The difference matters. The payment attaches to a title, and one book can have more than one rights holder, so an author and a publisher may both claim the same work. That appears to be where the friction starts.

The claims process has run into problems, including publishers making incorrect claims on authors’ allocations. Writer Beware reported on September 4 that authors receiving claim notices are disputing what publishers have asserted about those allocations. Vox has also covered the problems.

The payout covers only one part of what Anthropic did. In June 2025, Judge Alsup ruled that training LLMs on the books was fair use and called it “spectacularly” transformative. He also found that digitizing purchased print books was fair use. Using “pirated” copies in Anthropic’s central library was not. ArentFox Schiff describes that library as an effort to collect “all the books in the world” and keep them “forever”. Anthropic downloaded millions of pirated copies for free. It also bought millions of print books, cut off the bindings, scanned the pages and threw away the paper. The Pirate Library Mirror downloads now show up again, this time in a suit by music publishers.

Only 350 authors opted out, Ars Technica said. That leaves most of the remaining conflict inside the allocation process, between parties on the same side of the case.

The terms also require Anthropic to destroy the pirated files.