Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

7/21/2026 at 8:27:21 PM

If you have the time, read the judge's response to the motion:

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

The big deal for publishers and authors is the payout per eligible title is $3k. For a traditional publishing contract involving one author, the amount will be split down the middle.

The other thing which caught my eye is the judge slashed the class counsel's fee by half, from 12.5% ($187.5m) to 6.8% ($101m). The class counsel's unreimbursed litigation expenses were $2.6m.

The three class representatives get just $15k each.

by ilamont

7/21/2026 at 8:05:01 PM

I sincerely don't understand what the point of these laws are, when the cost of flagrant violations is no more than a slap on the wrist -- these really meager sums that serve as nothing more than something to point at and say "Look, we did something!"

Cover-your-ass strategy, and nothing more. Who, besides the ones at fault, are ever happy with these mean-nothing fines?

The justice system really needs an overhaul with how it tackles "justice" between the wealthy, the connected, the corporations, and the rest. Though I am unsure what that would look like. Minimum net wealth per category of infraction across the board?

Edit: grammar

by Varelion

7/21/2026 at 8:26:19 PM

This is a settlement that the authors and Anthropic agreed upon.

They agreed on the amount last year. The judge approved it now.

The lawsuit was for the way the books were acquired. They already ruled that it's not infringement to use the books.

The award was $3,000 per book, which is about 100X higher than it would have cost to buy the books.

It's never going to appease the people who demand companies be sued into collapse, but given that both parties came to an agreement and the damages are 100X higher than what a book costs, it looks reasonable to me.

by Aurornis

7/21/2026 at 8:27:57 PM

This case did at least shed light on the fair use argument.

by nadermx

7/21/2026 at 9:16:13 PM

> The award was $3,000 per book, which is about 100X higher than it would have cost to buy the books.

How many of the authors would license their book for endless creation of derivative works for that amount?

by scotty79

7/21/2026 at 9:40:23 PM

The judge already ruled that it was fair for Anthropic to use books for training if they acquired them legally.

by Aurornis

7/21/2026 at 10:02:13 PM

I dont see the relevance. If Anthropic had bought the book at the store, shredded the spine, scanned the pages and trained on that data instead, there wouldnt have been an issue.

Authors cant simply license away fair use. If it could be dismissed so easily the right wouldn't exist.

by protocolture

7/21/2026 at 9:44:26 PM

Probably few, but irrelevant as the ruling was it was not a derivative work.

by paulddraper

7/21/2026 at 10:03:39 PM

100x the books? Buying a book does not let you redistribute its contents.

If you are selling more than 100 books you are clearly losing out

by ekianjo

7/21/2026 at 8:12:59 PM

Punishable by fine just means it's legal for a cost. If the fine is less than the profit then they'll pay the fine every time.

by datakan

7/21/2026 at 10:03:12 PM

No the "fine" is 3000 bucks per book.

Thats more than it costs to just shred the spine and scan the book in. Which is probably 15 - 20 bucks a piece.

They will be shredding the book not paying the fine.

by protocolture

7/21/2026 at 9:29:28 PM

Civil justice is primarily about restoring damages, not about punishing wrongdoing (although common law in US it is more punitive than civil law in european countries). Therefore compensations are based on damages, not on profit from wrongdoings.

by zajio1am

7/21/2026 at 8:16:48 PM

the irony is that all of this money will go to rent-seeking publishers who won't pass it on to the artists; basically a dispute between the wealthy you're upset with

by renlo

7/21/2026 at 8:27:41 PM

The lawsuit was a mixed blend of individual authors and publishers.

It was started by a group of authors, not publishers.

by Aurornis

7/21/2026 at 9:18:45 PM

For the downvotes, my response is to read: https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/wh...

> If there is a current publisher(s) (which still possesses an exclusive license), the author(s) will split the $3000 with the publisher. Any co-authors will share the author portion and, if there are multiple publishers (e.g., different publishers have exclusive rights to different formats), they will share the publisher portion. Assume that the co-authors and co-publishers will share the portion equally unless their contracts provide otherwise. The standard default split between publishers and authors of noneducational texts is 50/50, as described below. Authors who are the sole rightsholder in a work—such as self-published authors and authors whose rights have reverted or where the contracts have otherwise terminated—will receive the full award amount.

It is split between the publisher and the author, also publishers will have a large catalog of books they will submit, an author typically will only have a few -- the payout will be going to the lawyers and mostly to publishers.

by renlo

7/21/2026 at 8:31:52 PM

Not true. Individual authors could sign up for the settlement. One of my books was in there under my name.

by robterrell

7/21/2026 at 9:17:23 PM

What's gonna be your payout and are you satisfied with it?

by scotty79

7/21/2026 at 8:14:25 PM

Because using pirated material is a civil issue, not a criminal offence?

by jaitsu

7/21/2026 at 8:17:03 PM

The laws are for you and me not companies like Anthropic and Meta.

by Ritewut

7/21/2026 at 9:29:50 PM

> I sincerely don't understand what the point of these laws are, when the cost of flagrant violations is no more than a slap on the wrist -- these really meager sums that serve as nothing more than something to point at and say "Look, we did something!"

To create a moat around wealth generation. After all, that is the main purpose of all legal systems---to keep the wealthy wealthy and the poor poor. In this case, the settlement is chump change for Anthropic, but ensures that no upstart will be able to compete with them since they will get reamed on copyright charges. It's no different from Google Image search. They can make a product out of republishing others' images. You cannot do it.

by bjourne

7/21/2026 at 8:24:11 PM

To keep users paying for content while companies do whatever they want - and if that's not the reason that's certainly an effect.

> The justice system really needs an overhaul with how it tackles "justice" between the wealthy, the connected, the corporations, and the rest. Though I am unsure what that would look like. Minimum net wealth per category of infraction across the board?

% of annual turnover seems like decent strategy. Caps the amount company can sue mere mortal for copyright infringement while at billion dollar company scale can wipe quite a bit

But main problem is enforcement and lobbying, not the size of the fine

by PunchyHamster

7/21/2026 at 7:36:16 PM

To be clear, the issue is not that the books were used to train Claude, but that they were pirated.

by jdlshore

7/21/2026 at 8:21:22 PM

A critical distinction, because they were going to to find terabytes of not pirated books to train on that contained the sum history of humanities knowledge /s

by EmoteSupportBot

7/21/2026 at 8:32:16 PM

They actually did this.

> Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase millions of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Each print book resulted in a PDF copy containing images of the scanned pages with machine-readable text (including front and back cover scans for softcover books

by Aurornis

7/21/2026 at 8:32:25 PM

They bought, scannned, trained from, and destroyed millions of paper books, which was ruled legal. This lawsuit was for training from LibGen.

by qq66

7/21/2026 at 9:22:09 PM

This is such a petty and impotent ruling. If you want to ban them from using culture to make derivative works without proper compensation then do that.

But if you don't want to ban them, telling them to buy one book of each, likely second hand, is complete pettiness that resulted in destructive scanning of millions of books, many of which were already practically available in digital form.

by scotty79

7/21/2026 at 8:27:03 PM

They could have purchased the books instead. It was easier to pirate.

by amanaplanacanal

7/21/2026 at 10:16:34 PM

I support anthropics position here, on both learning from and "pirating" books. The way i see things , the publishers and authors are happy with any policy that makes them more money, and more market control, regardless of what is ethical/just/right. They would shutdown public libraries , all libraries, if they could. Aaron Swartz lost his life because he tried to make public knowledge public, and they would be happy to put every information activist to death to protect their monopolies. IMHO they have no right to stop free access on the internet. The whole copyright system is artificial and monopolistic, and the publishers are complaining yet again, that technology moves information more efficiently than they do, so they want to artificially retard it through goverment action. The real goverment action that is needed, is to protect private/personal data; not data that is actively traded commercially or publically. These tech companies are invading personal and private spaces of everyday people, and storing and training with it. Even using it for military targetting and warrantless surveillance. Anthropic is by no means a good entity, so the way to stick it to them and all tech companies, is to allow their internet scraping, but make it outright criminal to use telemetry or any surveillance techniques they have or will develop. Also... the ”creators",hollywood,publishers, have no problems scraping themselves, and lift ideas from just about everywhere they can get it. Almost every hollywood movie is just an assemblage of random memes and topical concerns of everyday ppl, distilled into embelished predictable cheese. The publishers are the original slop actors. Human Slop.

by br0ceph

7/21/2026 at 7:56:11 PM

Seems squarely in the "cost of doing business" category

by processunknown

7/21/2026 at 7:13:43 PM

that number is missing a zero or two in front of the decimal point

by exabrial

7/21/2026 at 7:40:46 PM

As was pointed out, the settlement is for piracy, not training. They had already ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted material for training fell within fair use.

As such, if you pirated a book and had to pay $3000 for that one instance, I don't think you'd like it if I said you should have paid $30K or $300K instead. If anything, this is analogous to the ridiculous fines people had to pay when pirating music.

(Not that I'm complaining...)

by BeetleB

7/21/2026 at 8:15:50 PM

> As such, if you pirated a book and had to pay $3000 for that one instance, I don't think you'd like it if I said you should have paid $30K or $300K instead.

If you pirated a book for personal use the amount of liability wouldn't match a company whose profit could be attributed to pirating the same book. In US copyright law, a copyright infringer could be liable for "any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement" [1] (if the copyright owner elects to recover actual damages and profits instead of statutory damages).

[1] 17 U.S.C. § 504(b), https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504

by wgjordan

7/21/2026 at 8:36:19 PM

I would imagine that for over 99% of the books covered in this lawsuit, they're earning less than $3000 per book.

Put another way, their revenues wouldn't drop much if they simply hadn't trained on those 99%.

by BeetleB

7/21/2026 at 8:49:48 PM

IANAL, but the parent comment quotes "any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement", which I take to mean it's the profit Anthropic stands to make based on its use of the pirated content that's recoverable.

Given the entire global economy is currently bullish on the potential profitability of AI, I dare say they got off incredibly lightly settling for just $3k per book.

by ctippett

7/21/2026 at 8:20:35 PM

Thomas-Rasset got 80k per song and Tennenbaum got 22k per song. The law says up to 150k per work. It was a gift.

by trentor

7/21/2026 at 8:44:41 PM

Sure, but in any other instance of piracy, HN would call awarding $20k per pirated song insane.

by xboxnolifes

7/21/2026 at 9:08:48 PM

Because we are mostly discussing a single private person that got caught for maybe 20 songs. I don't want to bring up Aaron but the taste gets saltier the more we see settlements like this.

by trentor

7/21/2026 at 8:21:56 PM

Are "open" models exempt from that? Can imagine they used the same datasets.

by persedes

7/21/2026 at 8:42:45 PM

Many of the open weight models are trained on outputs from these models (distillation)

by curious_curios

7/21/2026 at 9:14:19 PM

If they provably shared those datasets then they're just as liable for piracy.

by AndrewDucker

7/21/2026 at 8:42:11 PM

Most open models are developed for profit so they should be equally liable.

by wmf

7/21/2026 at 9:03:44 PM

So... What about authors from other parts of the world? USA has settled a USA case and they think all is cool for the entire world. So americentric.

by HackerThemAll

7/21/2026 at 10:22:50 PM

Well, the USA has jurisdiction over USA companies. If the rest of the world's authors can find a way to obtain jurisdiction over the companies in a way that USA courts won't balk at if asked to enforce, then they're welcome to go ahead.

by ronsor

7/21/2026 at 7:27:12 PM

Maybe they can give it in the form of expiring Fable credits.

by FireBeyond

7/21/2026 at 7:41:26 PM

So that the authors can use it to write their next books!

by BeetleB

7/21/2026 at 9:01:50 PM

$3k a book is so cheap.

by nekooooo

7/21/2026 at 9:51:43 PM

Its probably 100x more than it would have cost to do it legitimately, so seems like reasonable damages to me

by sebzim4500