Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

US federal court grants preliminary approval to USD 1.5bn Anthropic authors’ class action settlement over AI training; fair use ruling stands, claims limited to pre‑25 August 2025 conduct

Published on: 01 October 2025

Published by a Law360 reporter

Legal News

Article summary

US District Judge William Alsup described the agreement as 'fair' and sufficient for preliminary approval, while cautioning that implementing the settlement could bring difficulties.

The authors' certified class action alleges Anthropic unlawfully exploited their copyright-protected works to build its flagship large language model, Claude. It sits among numerous lawsuits asserting that LLM makers have violated copyright-protected material to train their systems. The dispute forms part of a broader wave of claims targeting how the technology is trained on protected texts.

At a hearing in San Francisco federal court on 25 September 2025, plaintiffs' counsel, Justin Nelson of Susman Godfrey LLP, hailed the accord as a 'historic settlement'. Judge Alsup also observed that the deal contains an 'abort clause' if a substantial proportion of the class elects to opt out, adding that the exact threshold is confidential. He floated a hypothetical: a publisher with hundreds of titles opts out, potentially triggering the abort clause, and then says, 'we will come back in, but we want more money'. Some lawyers might pay that sum to preserve the agreement, the judge remarked. Settlement administration may prove complicated if significant opt-outs occur...

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