Bloomsbury Publishing, the British publisher behind the globally successful Harry Potter series, is set to receive a multimillion-dollar payout after being named among the largest beneficiaries of a $1.5 billion settlement in a US copyright case involving artificial intelligence company Anthropic.
The US District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval to the settlement on July 20, resolving claims that Anthropic used millions of pirated books to train its Claude artificial intelligence models.
In a statement on Wednesday, Bloomsbury confirmed it was among the beneficiaries of the class-action settlement.
Court documents list 14,087 Bloomsbury titles as eligible for compensation. Each qualifying work is expected to receive approximately $3,000 before legal fees and other deductions, with payments generally split equally between the publisher and the author.
The company said payments to rights holders are expected to be made in instalments, with the first distribution likely during the second half of its current financial year.
Anthropic denied any wrongdoing and did not admit liability under the settlement. The company has argued that its use of copyrighted material to train AI models is protected under the fair use doctrine.
The case originated from a 2024 lawsuit filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of downloading large volumes of copyrighted books from unauthorised online “shadow libraries” to train its AI systems.
The lawsuit later expanded into a class action covering hundreds of thousands of books.
The agreement is the first major settlement to emerge from a growing number of US copyright lawsuits brought by authors, publishers and news organisations against artificial intelligence companies over the use of copyrighted material for AI training.