Judge signs off on Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors

Reuters reports that a federal judge on Monday granted final approval to the settlement in a class-action copyright case. The payout works out to $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 titles, split between authors and rights holders.

Judge William Alsup, who gave preliminary approval, had earlier ruled that Anthropic illegally downloaded and stored millions of books. He found that training the model on copyrighted texts qualified as fair use, but that pulling books from pirate sites like Library Genesis did not. Because the company settled rather than go to a jury trial, the case won’t reach appeal or set binding precedent.