London, July 22: The UK-based publishing house, Bloomsbury Publishing, will be receiving a huge sum after the approval of a groundbreaking settlement of $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) by the US court involving the artificial intelligence firm, Anthropic in a copyright suit, one of the biggest copyright settlements ever.

The deal settles lawsuits against Anthropic for having trained its AI chatbot, Claude, using pirated copies of several hundred thousand books. Bloomsbury, which is famous for publishing Harry Potter and books written by best-selling authors like Sarah J. Maas and Susanna Clarke, has confirmed that 14,087 of its books are covered under the settlement.

As per the terms of the settlement, the estimated compensation is expected to be about $3,000 per title, indicating that Bloomsbury could receive an estimated sum of $42 million before deducting any legal fees and author payouts. It was mentioned that the publisher would divide the money with its authors and that payments were to be made in installments over the course of the second half of its financial year.

The case was filed in 2024 against Anthropic by some authors on the grounds that the company had used their copyrighted books without permission for training purposes. Although a previous court verdict indicated that such usage could qualify as fair use, the act of storing and using pirated versions of the books was a matter of concern in the copyright dispute.

According to the court, more than 91% of the 482,000 books covered by the settlement have already been claimed by eligible authors and publishers. Plaintiffs' attorney Justin Nelson described the agreement as "the largest known copyright recovery in history."

The settlement represents a major milestone in the ongoing legal battle over how AI companies use copyrighted material to train large language models. It also highlights growing pressure on AI developers to secure licences or compensate creators whose work contributes to the development of generative AI systems