Anthropic Settlement to Pay Andrew Stellman About $9,000 Over Pirated Books Used in Claude Training
Updated
Updated · O'Reilly Media · Sep 3
Anthropic Settlement to Pay Andrew Stellman About $9,000 Over Pirated Books Used in Claude Training
1 articles · Updated · O'Reilly Media · Sep 3
Summary
About $9,000 is due to Andrew Stellman, a similar amount to coauthor Jenny Greene and roughly $18,000 to O’Reilly under a settlement approved in July over pirated book copies used to train Claude.
The payout works out to a little more than $3,000 per book edition, with each edition counted separately, though Stellman said checks may still take months because of the administrative process.
Stellman argues the money matters less than attribution: he wants AI systems to identify when answers draw on his books and point users back to the original work.
He says current chatbot citations usually reflect live retrieval, not training data, but points to methods such as TracIn and influence functions — and a 37,000-parameter demo he built — as evidence attribution is technically possible.
The bigger obstacle, he argues, is legal risk: if labs explicitly credit a source, that acknowledgment could bolster willful-infringement claims carrying up to $150,000 per work.