Lessons from the Anthropic Class Settlement

The importance of filing copyright.

I just found $31,500! I am a member of the class action lawsuit against Anthropic Claim Settlement, and fourteen of my books are included in the lawsuit. Each included title will receive $3000, minus 25% for the lawyers, so $2250/book. That’s $31,500!

Let’s look at the case and see what lessons it has for us! Because it has one BIG important lesson!

Anthropic Class Action Lawsuit

In 2023, authors Charles Graeber, Kirk Wallace Johnson, and Andrea Bartz filed a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic, the A.I. company with a Large Language Model (LLM) called Anthropic or Claude. The authors alleged that Anthropic had violated copyright by using copyrighted titles obtained from two pirated databases of books to train the LLM. The databases were LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror. To train an LLM requires massive data and the source of that data has been debated hotly.

In June 2025, the judge ruled that using books to train AI and LLMs is legal under fair use doctrine. However, piracy of books is NOT fair use. By using pirated materials, Anthropic was found liable for copyrighted materials in the pirated databases.

Notice a couple things about the settlement:

• This is only about the pirated materials, and the dates on which Anthropic accessed those pirated databases will matter.

• This is also a huge win for AI-advocates because the judge ruled that using copyrighted books for training AI is legal under fair use. There are other lawsuits playing out right now which will either confirm this or challenge it. We’ll see where the winds blow in the next year or two.

• This is a class-action lawsuit for rightsholders in the piracy claim.

$1.5 Billion Settlement

Anthropic has agreed to a $1.5 Billion settlement! Wow!

You can check if one of your books is included in the settlement here.

Is yours included?

Dates Matter!

There’s been a lot of confusion because on March 20, 2025, The Atlantic magazine reported on the LibGen pirated database and included a search engine for titles in the LibGen database.

Database Date: But the list of books included in the lawsuit is different. Anthropic didn’t access any pirated titles after July, 2021. From that date to March 20, 2025 article, LibGen continued to add more titles to its pirated database. That’s almost four years of extra pirated titles, that are not included in the lawsuit.

It’s like taking a snapshot on a particular day and then another snapshot three years and nine months later. Think of it as a photo of a ten-year old who then hits a growth spurt and almost four years later is taller and stronger. The Atlantic LibGen database is that teenager, while the Claim Settlement database is smaller like the ten year old. If your book was listed in the Atlantic list, you still need to check the Claims Settlement database to see if your book is included in the settlement.

Copyright Date: After that, the books had to have copyright registered with the US Copyright Office in a timely manner. Quoting from the FAQ:

…a work falls within the Class definition only if it has an ISBN or ASIN; was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office within five years of publication; and was registered before being downloaded by Anthropic, or within three months of publication.

That means:

1. it needs an ISBN or ASIN (the ASIN is Amazon’s number for identifying a title, so self-published books were easily included,

2. the copyright had to be officially registered, and

3. it had to be timely, within five years of publication, and

4. it had to be registered before the dates of Anthropic downloads.

Only ~7% of Titles Eligible for Compensation

The numbers given in FAQ 52 are rounded, so the total equals slightly more than 7 million.

Incredibly, Anthropic provided 7 million files that were copied from the two databases. Of that, only 500,000 were considered qualified to receive compensation. That means only 7% of the titles were included in the settlement!

FAQ 52 explains that 40%, or 2.8 million were duplicates of the same title. They also eliminated corrupt, empty, or incomplete files. Another 2.5 million were written in another language and non-English titles rarely have titles registered. Another 1.5 million titles did not have copyright registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. That left only about 500,000 titles eligible in the lawsuit, or about 7% of the titles provided by Anthropic.

File Your Copyright!

That is — 1.5 million titles would have been eligible for a settlement claim IF they had filed their copyright. As traditionally published authors are finding out, the publishing companies often didn’t file the copyright as required in their contracts.

However, I found that I’m negligent, too! I thought I was diligent to always file copyright! I have 57 copyright registration certificates carefully filed in a special notebook. But five titles slipped through without registering copyright. I was horrified. Three were after the Anthropic cutoff date, so it didn’t affect this settlement. But two of them might have been included had I filed in a timely manner.

Our Business IS Copyright

I’ve written this before, but I need to emphasize it for myself as well as for you. We only have a business publishing our children’s books because the federal government protects our copyright. When you create something it is automatically protected from being copied without your permission. However, to be able to claim compensation in a case such as this, you must have filed your copyright with the Copyright Office.

Your copyright lasts your lifetime + 70 years! That means (assuming I life another 20 years), my copyright will extend for the next 90 years and my heirs will be able to manage the licensing of my copyright.

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I’ve always said that I file copyright for every book! After I realized that a few title slipped by without filing, I’m going to be much stricter on this. Copyright registration is valuable anytime you go to court for a copyright violation, whether it’s an individual or a corporation, whether it’s a class action lawsuit or a private lawsuit. Registering your copyright gives you the right to receive compensation. Do it!