Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5bn to settle a class action brought by authors whose books were used without permission to train its AI assistant Claude. The money is now being counted out, and many writers are discovering that the answer to who gets paid for their work is not obvious.

The settlement is among the largest of the early AI copyright cases. It covers more than 482,000 books. Under the terms approved by a federal judge in the Northern District of California, each qualifying title can generate up to $3,000. At the top rate the full list of titles comes to roughly $1.45bn. The case was filed in 2024 and approved in July.

The central issue is ownership. After the approval deadline passed, authors and publishers began filing competing claims over the same books. The settlement administrator has started telling both sides that it has recorded an ownership disagreement. In many cases, those disagreements may slow down payment or force a claim into arbitration.

Who owns the claim?

Authors do not keep the entire $3,000. They split it with the publishers they granted rights to and with any co-authors. Publishers were always in line for a payout because most book contracts transfer certain rights to the company that publishes the work. A class-action council set the percentages after taking input from the Authors Guild, which says it has more than 18,000 members, and from publishers. There was no title-by-title negotiation.

In trade publishing, authors commonly expect to split proceeds with their publisher. The default assumption in the settlement has been a 50/50 division. But the share can vary sharply from one contract to another. Some older contracts contain broad language assigning the publisher control over licensing income, while others are silent on categories of money that did not exist when they were signed.

Textbook authors are the most exposed. Their contracts typically give them only 10 to 15 percent of revenue, according to Mary Rasenberger, the Authors Guild’s chief executive. Rasenberger said the guild is hearing from a lot of unhappy textbook writers right now. She does not read the publisher claims as a grab or as opportunism. Her concern is record-keeping. Publishers that never removed reverted titles from their catalogues are now claiming those books by default, even when the rights had long since returned to the author.

Two authors, two different problems

April Henry has written more than 30 mysteries and thrillers. When she logged into the claims portal, she found HarperCollins listed as a part-owner of her first book, Circles of Confusion, which was published in 1999. The rights had reverted to her in 2007, and she said so on Threads. Her agent produced a letter confirming that she owned the book. After she uploaded the letter, the portal showed the full $3,000 going to her. Henry said she did not believe HarperCollins was deliberately trying to cheat her. HarperCollins declined to comment.

Henry has 22 titles on the list of books that Anthropic took. She expects somewhere in the mid-$20,000 range once her publishers and co-authors take their cut. She was told that payments might start flowing in August. They have not.

Amy Lupold Bair has the other problem. Her publisher is not disputing who owns her guidebooks about blogging and family life online. It is disputing the split. She wrote on Threads that the publisher only wanted her, the author whose entire work was stolen, to get 10 percent. She did not name the publisher. Her website lists John Wiley & Sons for two of her titles, Raising Digital Families for Dummies and Blogging for Dummies. Wiley has said it filed claims for all Wiley-published works and that allocations for educational titles follow individual contracts. It has not said whether the Dummies series counts as educational. The Association of American Publishers did not comment.

The date that decides who gets paid

Underneath both cases sits a single question: not who owns the book now, but who owned it when Anthropic downloaded the text. Rasenberger places that activity in 2021 and 2022. That means a title that reverted to its author in 2023 was still the publisher’s when the infringement happened. Reversion after the download does not erase the publisher’s claim to that specific use.

The guild reported hearing from one such author this week. The rights had come back to them this year, which settled nothing, because the download predated the reversion by four years. The practical effect is to turn the payout into a records exercise across decades of publishing contracts. Where the two sides cannot agree, a court-appointed arbitrator decides. The guild says it will fight hard for any author it believes is losing out.

Publishing gets its streaming moment

Kristelia García, who teaches copyright at Georgetown Law, compares the Anthropic settlement to the fight over Eminem’s digital royalties. Producers sued a Universal Music Group subsidiary in 2007, arguing that downloads should pay a higher rate than records. That case settled in 2012.

García says the parallel is in the paperwork. Most book contracts say nothing about copyright settlements or revenue from technologies that nobody had built when the author signed. Publishing is having a kind of streaming moment in which legacy contracts do not contemplate the new source of income. The settlement therefore requires interpreting old language and assignment clauses through a modern digital copyright dispute.

What Anthropic still owes, and to whom

Anthropic settled after a judge let the case go to trial, having found that stockpiling pirated books gave the authors a claim. The same ruling held that training Claude on books the company had bought legally was fair use. That finding is now cited by AI defendants generally, and it is why some companies have begun buying up older books rather than scraping or pirating them.

Anthropic declined to comment beyond an earlier statement from May. At that time, Aparna Sridhar, its deputy general counsel, said that more than 91 percent of authors and publishers had claimed their share and that Anthropic wanted the matter closed. The ownership disputes surfaced after that statement.

Anthropic’s other copyright problems remain active. Sony Music and Warner Chappell are suing over song lyrics in Claude’s training data. In New York, Microsoft has told a court that Copilot almost never reproduces books, running the same kind of fair-use argument against news publishers and the Authors Guild.

The Anthropic settlement was intended to be the clean outcome, the one that showed rights-holders could be paid for AI training. What it has produced first is 482,000 books, an arbitrator, and many authors rereading contracts they signed before Claude existed.

Source:TNW | Legal News