Almost 120,000 authors and copyright holders have submitted claims covering 91% of the works in Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright class-action settlement, according to a court filing, as the case approaches a final approval hearing next month.
The settlement, described by courts as the largest in US copyright history, covers more than 480,000 books that Anthropic downloaded from pirate library sites Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror to train its Claude artificial intelligence models.
Lead counsel Justin Nelson of Susman Godfrey said the claims rate demonstrated overwhelming support from the class.
"This claims rate is another reason why this settlement is so historic," Nelson told Reuters.
Three authors, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, filed the original lawsuit against Anthropic in 2024, alleging the company used pirated copies of their books without permission.
The case was certified as a class action in July 2025, expanding to represent all copyright holders whose works Anthropic had acquired from the pirate databases.
US District Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of legally obtained books for AI training was protected as fair use, a significant finding for the broader AI industry.
However, he held that downloading and retaining more than seven million pirated books in what the ruling described as a "central library" was not fair use and constituted infringement.
With statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work and hundreds of thousands of books in the class, Anthropic faced theoretical liability exceeding $70 billion had the case gone to trial.
The company, backed by Amazon and Alphabet, agreed to the settlement in August 2025.
Under the deal, each copyright holder will receive roughly $3,000 per qualifying work, and Anthropic has committed to destroying the pirated datasets and certifying that the material is not used in its commercial models.
Law firms Susman Godfrey and Lieff Cabraser, the court-appointed lead counsel, are seeking 12.5% of the fund, or $187.5 million, in legal fees.
The request was reduced from an initial $300 million proposal after both Anthropic and judges raised concerns that the original figure was too large, particularly a $75 million allocation to three additional firms not formally appointed to represent the class.
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US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, who inherited the case after Alsup took inactive status, is scheduled to consider final approval at a hearing on 23 April in San Francisco.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The recap
- Nearly 120,000 authors seek shares from Anthropic settlement fund
- Claims filed cover 91% of more than 480,000 works
- Court will consider final approval at a hearing next month
