Why UK’s Bloomsbury stands to gain from Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement

Britain’s Bloomsbury Publishing announced on Wednesday that it was among the main beneficiaries of a $1.5 billion class-action settlement resolving claims that artificial intelligence company Anthropic used pirated book collections to train its Claude AI models without purchasing the content.

According to Bloomsbury, a US court recognized 14,087 of its titles covered under the settlement with a proposed remuneration of about $3,000 per tile, split equitably between the authors and publisher.

This settlement stems from a representative class-action lawsuit approved by a federal judge which alleged that Anthropic downloaded shadow libraries to train its Claude AI chatbot without permission.

The current settlement marks the largest copyright damage in US history. Earlier a judge in San Francisco signed off an artificial intelligence company Anthropic’s watershed moment on Anthropic $1.5 billion settlement, resolving a lawsuit brought by authors who accused the AI company of training its chatbots.

“We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court's landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair ​use under copyright law — which remains the law today, “Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement.

Nonetheless, the British company stated that the funds will be spread over several payments expected to begin in the second half of the financial year.