Harvard Professors May Be Eligible for Payments in $1.5 Billion AI Copyright Settlement; The Harvard Crimson, October 1, 2025

Victoria D. Rengel, The Harvard Crimson;  Harvard Professors May Be Eligible for Payments in $1.5 Billion AI Copyright Settlement

"Following mediation, the plaintiffs and defendants filed a motion for the preliminary approval of a settlement on Sept. 5, which included an agreement from Anthropic that it will destroy its pirated databases and pay $1.5 billion in damages to a group of authors and publishers.

On Sept. 25, a California federal judge granted preliminary approval for a settlement, the largest in the history of copyright cases in the U.S.

Each member of the class will receive a payment of approximately $3,000 per pirated work.

Authors whose works are in the databases are not notified separately, but instead must submit their contact information to receive a formal notice of the class action — meaning a number of authors, including many Harvard professors, may be unaware that their works were pirated by Anthropic.

Lynch said Anthropic’s nonconsensual use of her work undermines the purpose behind why she, and other scholars, write and publish their work.

“All of us at Harvard publish, but we thought when we were publishing that we are doing that — to communicate to other human beings,” she said. “Not to be fed into this mill.”"

I Sued Anthropic, and the Unthinkable Happened; The New York Times, September 29, 2025

 Andrea Bartz , The New York Times; I Sued Anthropic, and the Unthinkable Happened

"In August 2024, I became one of three named plaintiffs leading a class-action lawsuit against the A.I. company Anthropic for pirating my books and hundreds of thousands of other books to train its A.I. The fight felt daunting, almost preposterous: me — a queer, female thriller writer — versus a company now worth $183 billion?

Thanks to the relentless work of everyone on my legal team, the unthinkable happened: Anthropic agreed to pay authors and publishers $1.5 billion in the largest copyright settlement in history. A federal judge preliminarily approved the agreement last week.

This settlement sends a clear message to the Big Tech companies splashing generative A.I. over every app and page and program: You are not above the law. And it should signal to consumers everywhere that A.I. isn’t an unstoppable tsunami about to overwhelm us. Now is the time for ordinary Americans to recognize our agency and act to put in place the guardrails we want.

The settlement isn’t perfect. It’s absurd that it took an army of lawyers to demonstrate what any 10-year-old knows is true: Thou shalt not steal. At around $3,000 per work, shared by the author and publisher, the damages are far from life-changing (and, some argue, a slap on the wrist for a company flush with cash). I also disagree with the judge’s ruling that, had Anthropic acquired the books legally, training its chatbot on them would have been “fair use.” I write my novels to engage human minds — not to empower an algorithm to mimic my voice and spit out commodity knockoffs to compete directly against my originals in the marketplace, nor to make that algorithm’s creators unfathomably wealthy and powerful.

But as my fellow plaintiff Kirk Wallace Johnson put it, this is “the beginning of a fight on behalf of humans that don’t believe we have to sacrifice everything on the altar of A.I.” Anthropic will destroy its trove of illegally downloaded books; its competitors should take heed to get out of the business of piracy as well. Dozens of A.I. copyright lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI, Microsoft and other companies, led in part by Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, David Baldacci, John Grisham, Stacy Schiff and George R. R. Martin. (The New York Times has also brought a suit against OpenAI and Microsoft.)

Though a settlement isn’t legal precedent, Bartz v. Anthropic may serve as a test case for other A.I. lawsuits, the first domino to fall in an industry whose “move fast, break things” modus operandi led to large-scale theft. Among the plaintiffs of other cases are voice actors, visual artists, record labels, YouTubers, media companies and stock-photo libraries, diverse stakeholders who’ve watched Big Tech encroach on their territory with little regard for copyright law...

Now the book publishing industry has sent a message to all A.I. companies: Our intellectual property isn’t yours for the taking, and you cannot act with impunity. This settlement is an opening gambit in a critical battle that will be waged for years to come."

Judge approves $1.5 billion copyright settlement between AI company Anthropic and authors; AP, September 25, 2025

BARBARA ORTUTAY , AP; Judge approves $1.5 billion copyright settlement between AI company Anthropic and authors

" A federal judge on Thursday approved a $1.5 billion settlement between artificial intelligence company Anthropic and authors who allege nearly half a million books had been illegally pirated to train chatbots.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the preliminary approval in San Francisco federal court Thursday after the two sides worked to address his concerns about the settlement, which will pay authors and publishers about $3,000 for each of the books covered by the agreement. It does not apply to future works."

Screw the money — Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement sucks for writers; TechCrunch, September 5, 2025

Amanda Silberling , TechCrunch; Screw the money — Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement sucks for writers

"But writers aren’t getting this settlement because their work was fed to an AI — this is just a costly slap on the wrist for Anthropic, a company that just raised another $13 billion, because it illegally downloaded books instead of buying them.

In June, federal judge William Alsup sided with Anthropic and ruled that it is, indeed, legal to train AI on copyrighted material. The judge argues that this use case is “transformative” enough to be protected by the fair use doctrine, a carve-out of copyright law that hasn’t been updated since 1976.

“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” the judge said.

It was the piracy — not the AI training — that moved Judge Alsup to bring the case to trial, but with Anthropic’s settlement, a trial is no longer necessary."

Anthropic’s settlement with authors may be the ‘first domino to fall’ in AI copyright battles; Fortune, August 27, 2025

BEATRICE NOLAN, Fortune; Anthropic’s settlement with authors may be the ‘first domino to fall’ in AI copyright battles

"The amount of the settlement was not immediately disclosed, but legal experts not involved in the case said the figure could easily reach into the hundreds of millions. It’s also still unclear how the settlement will be distributed among various copyright holders, which could include large publishing houses as well as individual authors.

The case was the first certified class action against an AI company over the use of copyrighted materials, and the quick settlement, which came just one month after the judge ruled the case could proceed to trial as a class action, is a win for the authors, according to legal experts."

Anthropic Settles High-Profile AI Copyright Lawsuit Brought by Book Authors; Wired, August 26, 2025

Kate Knobs, Wired ; Anthropic Settles High-Profile AI Copyright Lawsuit Brought by Book Authors

"ANTHROPIC HAS REACHED a preliminary settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by a group of prominent authors, marking a major turn in one of the most significant ongoing AI copyright lawsuits in history. The move will allow Anthropic to avoid what could have been a financially devastating outcome in court."

Eddy Grant And Donald Trump Settle Copyright Lawsuit Over Use Of ‘Electric Avenue’ In Campaign Video; Deadline, November 21, 2024

Ted Johnson , Deadline; Eddy Grant And Donald Trump Settle Copyright Lawsuit Over Use Of ‘Electric Avenue’ In Campaign Video

"Eddy Grant and Donald Trump have reached a settlement in the singer’s copyright infringement lawsuit over the Trump campaign’s use of “Electric Avenue” in an online video promoting his 2020 reelection campaign. 

U.S. District Judge John Koetl filed notice that the parties had reached a settlement, but a sum was not disclosed. The judge also wrote that the case was discontinued with prejudice but without costs.

In September, the judge found Trump liable for copyright infringement, leaving unresolved the issue of whether a jury should be convened to decide an amount. Grant has asked for $300,000 and lawyers’ fees in the four-year-old case."