Anthropic settles for $1.5 billion after training Claude on pirated books, and Europe is watching closely

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model, has agreed to a $1.5 billion class-action settlement after being caught using pirated books to train its flagship product. The case, known as Bartz v. Anthropic, covers approximately 500,000 copyrighted works and will pay qualifying US-registered rightsholders roughly $3,000 per title. The Irish Writers’ Union has now entered the picture, reaching its own arrangement with Anthropic and actively advising Irish authors on how to file claims. The union sees the case as a potential precedent for European copyright enforcement against AI companies. What actually happened The lawsuit alleged that Anthropic downloaded books from Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi), two well-known piracy platforms, to feed its language models during training. A US District Court issued a mixed ruling that drew a surprisingly clear line. Training AI on legally acquired material? That could qualify as fair use. Downloading copyrighted works from pirate sites to build your dataset? That’s plain infringement. As part of the settlement, Anthropic is required to destroy the pirated datasets used in training. Final court approval is expect...