Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by book authors who alleged the company used pirated copies of their works to train its AI chatbot, Claude. The settlement involves Claude paying each author about $3,000 for about 500,000 books. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California last year by Andrea Bartz, a thriller novelist, and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. The authors accused Anthropic of mass piracy by downloading millions of books from pirate sources Library Genesis and PiLiMi. In June, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s use of the authors’ books without permission was allowable under fair use laws, so long as the books were acquired legally, but that the more than 7 million digitized books Anthropic downloaded and “knew had been pirated” were not fair use. He scheduled a trial for Dec. 1, 2025. On Aug. 28, 2025, the parties jointly filed a notice asking the court to stay the trial and approve the settlement. Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors, called it “the largest copyright recovery ever” and “the first of its kind in the AI era.” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said the settlement sends a clear message that AI companies must pay for the books they use.