UK: Bloomsbury to receive £14m from AI copyright settlement

The publisher said 14,087 Bloomsbury titles were covered by the agreement, with the proposed settlement providing about $3,000 per work, less legal fees and other expenses. Bloomsbury said its share of the payout would be divided equally between the publisher and its authors.

The settlement, approved by a federal judge in San Francisco, is the largest known copyright payout in US history and resolves a class action brought by authors who alleged Anthropic used their books without permission to train its large language models.

The lawsuit, filed in 2024, claimed the Amazon- and Alphabet-backed company copied books to teach Claude to respond to user prompts.

Last year, Judge William Alsup ruled that using books to train AI amounted to fair use under US copyright law, but found Anthropic had infringed copyright by storing more than seven million books in a central library that was not necessarily used for AI training.

A trial to determine damages had been expected to expose Anthropic to potentially enormous financial liability before the parties reached a settlement.

Some authors and publishers opted out of the agreement and continue to pursue separate claims.

Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said: “We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court’s landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law – which remains the law today.”

“We are pleased that more than 91 per cent of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment, and we’re looking forward to bringing this matter to a close.”