Settlement · $1.5B Anthropic — Pirated Books to Train AI

In a class action brought by authors, a California judge ruled in June 2025 that training AI on books can be fair use — but that downloading pirated copies is not, finding Anthropic may have downloaded as many as 7 million books from pirate sites. The case settled for $1.5 billion, an estimated ~$3,000 per work, covering nearly half a million authors. Some authors objected that the deal doesn't hold AI firms accountable for the act of training on the stolen material itself.