Judge delays approval of Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors
A U.S. federal judge delayed final approval of Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors who sued over unauthorized use of their books to train the Claude AI chatbot. The judge requested additional information on attorney fees and payments to lead plaintiffs, while some authors objected that the settlement was insufficient and others filed separate lawsuits.
What happened
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin did not grant final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors on May 15, 2026, instead requesting more detail on lawyers' fees and payments to lead plaintiffs.
Now-retired Judge William Alsup had initially greenlit the settlement in September 2025.
The settlement concerns claims that Anthropic used more than 7 million pirated books without permission to train its AI chatbot Claude. Alsup had ruled in June that while Anthropic made fair use of the authors' work for training, the company violated their rights by saving pirated books to a central library not necessarily used for AI training.
Reported impact
This is the largest known U.S. copyright settlement, with claims covering over 92% of more than 480,000 works included.
Authors and publishers have objected, arguing the settlement is not large enough, overcompensates the plaintiffs' attorneys, or wrongly excludes some copyright owners. A group of more than 25 writers, including Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, opted out and filed a new complaint against Anthropic in California on May 14, 2026.
Index analysis
The case is one of dozens brought by copyright owners including authors and news outlets against technology companies over the training of large language models, and the first major U.S. case to settle.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.