Anthropic has reached an agreement to settle a class action lawsuit filed by a group of American writers who accused it of illegally using their works to train artificial intelligence, The Verge reports.
According to the agreement, Anthropic must pay authors at least $1.5 billion plus interest, which is approximately $3,000 for each book or other work.
The agreement covers about 500,000 works, and if the number of claimed works exceeds this figure, the company undertakes to pay an additional $3,000 for each. In addition to financial compensation, Anthropic must destroy all original files and their copies that were uploaded for training the models.
The lawsuit was filed in August 2024 by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. They alleged that the company "built a multibillion-dollar business by using hundreds of thousands of books without permission." In July 2025, a federal court in California allowed the authors to represent all American writers whose works may have been obtained from pirate libraries.
A court hearing to approve the agreement is scheduled for September 8. The press release states that the agreement only applies to actions taken before August 25, 2025, and does not grant Anthropic the right to further use the works for AI training.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs said it was "considered the largest publicly recorded fine in the history of U.S. copyright litigation."