Judge approves Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement over pirated books
CodeByPoonam · x · 2026-07-21
A federal judge has approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement, believed to be the largest in U.S. history. The deal covers roughly 500,000 books at about $3,000 per work and requires Anthropic to destroy the pirated copies it stored.
The key legal point is that the court did not rule that training AI on books is illegal. Instead, the payout addresses how Anthropic obtained the material: the company stored about 7 million pirated copies in a central library. That means the settlement is about piracy, not the training itself.
The post argues this distinction will shape the rest of the industry’s copyright fights, since dozens of other lawsuits against AI labs are still moving through the courts.
Related event: Anthropic Settles Copyright Lawsuit for $1.5B(23 posts)→
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