Bloomsbury Secures $19 Million From Anthropic's $1.5 Billion AI Copyright Settlement
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Jul 22
Bloomsbury Secures $19 Million From Anthropic's $1.5 Billion AI Copyright Settlement
3 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Jul 22
Summary
Bloomsbury said it expects about $19 million after fees from Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement, with a matching amount going to affected authors tied to its catalog.
14,087 Bloomsbury titles were listed in the case at roughly $3,000 each, and the London-based publisher said payments could begin in installments in the second half of this fiscal year.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the deal this week, calling it “meaningful relief”; about 91% of the 482,000 works covered by the lawsuit have already been claimed.
The 2024 case accused Anthropic of using copyrighted books to train Claude chatbots without permission, producing what plaintiffs’ lawyers called the largest known copyright recovery in history.
The payout lands as AI copyright fights spread across US courts, even as Bloomsbury separately expands licensing of academic works for AI training under opt-in royalty deals.
Anthropic paid $1.5B, but why do many authors see the landmark AI settlement as a loss for creators?
With over 100 lawsuits pending, will AI's future be built on licensing deals or courtroom battles?
$1.5 Billion Anthropic Copyright Settlement Sets New Precedent for AI Data Sourcing and Creator Rights
Overview
In August 2025, Anthropic agreed to a landmark $1.5 billion settlement after facing a major class-action lawsuit that began in August 2024. The lawsuit accused Anthropic of using pirated copies of about 500,000 copyrighted books from illicit online sources to train its AI models without permission. As a result, both authors and publishers became eligible for payouts from the settlement fund. To ensure fair distribution, an Author-Publisher Working Group was proposed to manage how the funds would be allocated, marking a significant moment for copyright and AI in the publishing industry.