Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

Settlement Terms (from the case pdf)

1. A Settlement Fund of at least $1.5 Billion: Anthropic has agreed to pay a minimum of $1.5 billion into a non-reversionary fund for the class members. With an estimated 500,000 copyrighted works in the class, this would amount to an approximate gross payment of $3,000 per work. If the final list of works exceeds 500,000, Anthropic will add $3,000 for each additional work.

2. Destruction of Datasets: Anthropic has committed to destroying the datasets it acquired from LibGen and PiLiMi, subject to any legal preservation requirements.

3. Limited Release of Claims: The settlement releases Anthropic only from past claims of infringement related to the works on the official "Works List" up to August 25, 2025. It does not cover any potential future infringements or any claims, past or future, related to infringing outputs generated by Anthropic's AI models.

So... it would be a lot cheaper to just buy all of the books?

Yes, much.

And they actually went and did that afterwards. They just pirated them first.

Where can I find source that says Anthropic bought the pirated books afterwards? I haven't seen this in any official document.

Also, do we know if the newer models were trained without the pirated books?

> Where can I find source that says Anthropic bought the pirated books afterwards? I haven't seen this in any official document.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

> Also, do we know if the newer models were trained without the pirated books?

I'm pretty sure we do but I couldn't swear to it or quickly locate a source.

Thanks for the link.

Among several places where judge mentions Anthropic buying legit copies of books it pirated, probably this sentence is most relevant: "That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages."

But document does not say Anthropic bought EVERY book it pirated. Other sections in the document also don't explicitly say that EVERY pirated book was later purchased.

I stopped using Claude when this case came to light. If the newer Claude models don't use pirated books, I can resume using it.

When you say, "I'm pretty sure we do...", do you mean that pirated books were used, or were they not used?