Authors Challenge Publishers Over Share of $1.5B Anthropic Settlement for AI Training on Copyrighted Books

Authors push back as publishers and agents seek share of Anthropic settlement

Some authors hoping to receive their share of Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement said they received surprising emails this week -- emails informing them that someone else was making a claim on their payments. Anthropic settled a copyright class action suit last year, after a judge ruled that training AI models on copyrighted material is legal under fair use doctrine, but pirating that material was not. The deal received final approval in July, allowing the payments to move forward. Under the terms of the settlement, the authors of nearly 500,000 titles will be paid $3,000 for each pirated work. If the book is still in-print with a traditional publisher, the money will be split 50-50 between author and publisher. If the book was self-published, or if the publisher reverted the rights by allowing the book to go out-of-print, then the author should get the entire payment. But writers have been posting on social media that publishers seem to be claiming more than their fair share of some payments. For example, mystery and thriller author April Henry asked, "WTF is HarperCollins playing at? They claimed one of my books on the Anthropic Settlement that reverted back at least 17 years ago AND on the same day I got a credit alert saying they had been added as my employer! (which they never were)." At the popular blog Writers Beware, Victoria Strauss wrote that she's been receiving author complaints that fall into two broad categories: one where publishers are seeking payment for works that they no longer have a legitimate claim on (because the rights have reverted), and another where publishers are seeking a full 100% payment when they're only entitled to 50%. In both cases, Strauss said she's "reluctant to attribute to malice what can be plausibly explained by poor recordkeeping" -- and she noted that some publishers have already said this is a mistake that they've asked Anthropic to fix. Similarly, Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told The New York Times that she doesn't see this as "a grab by the publishers" and that she doesn't believe publishers are "specifically trying to screw any author over." Instead, she argued that this is the predictable result of bad record-keeping and a confusing settlement process. Strauss also acknowledged that any complaints she's seen are just "a peek through a small crack in a massive wall." "But the unusually large number of reports I've received over the last two days, as well as the fact that authors are reporting the exact same errors over and over, suggest to me that these aren't the kind of routine glitches you might expect from such a large operation, but something much more wide[s]pread and systemic," she wrote. And publishers aren't the only ones seeking a cut of the payments. Strauss said she's gotten complaints that a number of literary agencies are also making claims, which she said is surprising since "agents are not rightsholders in the books that they sell." Author Courtney Milan (the pen name of former law clerk and law professor Heidi Bond) was more blunt in a post on Bluesky, writing, "Apparently some agents are trying to claim percentages on the Anthropic settlement, and I do not REMOTELY think they should do this, what the fuck, stop that shit!" Milan and the Authors Guild also shared more details about how authors can dispute their payment allocations. (One tricky issue: When the rights to a specific book reverted. In order for an author to make a 100% claim on a book, the rights reversion needs to have happened before August 10, 2022, which is the "download date" in the settlement.)

Anthropic settlement: who gets the $3,000 per book?

Anthropic is paying $1.5bn to the authors whose books it pirated. As the money lands, some of it is going to their publishers instead. The Anthropic settlement has run into contracts written long before AI training existed, and nobody is sure who owned what in 2021. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5bn to the authors whose books it pirated. The money is now being counted out. Some of those authors are discovering that a share of it goes to their own publishers. The New York Times reported on Friday that authors and publishers have filed competing claims over the same titles. The settlement administrator has begun telling both sides they disagree. The class action covers more than 482,000 books. It pays up to $3,000 for each one a judge found Anthropic had downloaded illegally and stored while building Claude. A judge in the Northern District of California approved it in July. At the top rate, the full list of titles comes to roughly $1.45bn. Authors filed the case in 2024. The default split is 50/50, and not everyone gets it Authors do not keep the whole $3,000. They split it with the publishers they granted rights to, and with any co-authors. Publishers were always in line for a payout. A class-action council set the percentages. It took input from the Authors Guild, which says it has more than 18,000 members, and from publishers. Nobody negotiated them title by title. Textbook authors come off worst. Their contracts hand them as little as 10 to 15% of the total, according to Mary Rasenberger, the guild's chief executive. "It's the textbooks where there are a lot of unhappy authors right now," Rasenberger said. She does not read it as opportunism. "I don't see this as a grab by the publishers," she said. Her concern is record-keeping. Publishers that never removed reverted titles from their catalogues are now claiming them back by default. Two authors, two different problems April Henry has written more than 30 mysteries and thrillers. Logging into the claims portal, she found HarperCollins listed as a part-owner of her first book, Circles of Confusion, published in 1999. The rights had reverted to her in 2007, and she said so on Threads. Her agent produced a letter confirming she owned them. She uploaded it, and the portal later showed the full $3,000 going to her. "I don't think Harper was deliberately trying to cheat," she said. HarperCollins declined to comment. Henry has 22 titles on the list of books Anthropic took. She expects somewhere in the mid-$20,000 range once her publishers and co-authors take their cut. She was told payments might start flowing in August. They have not. Amy Lupold Bair has the other problem. Her publisher is not disputing who owns her guidebooks about blogging and family life online. It is disputing the split. "They only want me, the author whose entire work was stolen, to get 10%," she wrote on Threads. She did not name the publisher. Her website lists John Wiley & Sons for two of the titles, Raising Digital Families for Dummies and Blogging for Dummies. Wiley told the Times it had filed claims for all Wiley-published works, and that allocations for educational titles follow individual contracts. It did not say whether the Dummies series counts as educational. The Association of American Publishers did not comment. The date that decides who gets paid Underneath both cases sits a single question, and it is not who owns a book now. It is who owned it when Anthropic downloaded it. Rasenberger puts that in 2021 and 2022. A title that reverted to its author last year was still the publisher's when the infringement happened. The guild heard from one such author this week. The rights had come back to them this year, which settles nothing, because the download predates the reversion by four years. That turns a payout into a records exercise across decades of publishing contracts. Where the two sides cannot agree, a court-appointed arbitrator decides. The guild says it will fight hard for any author it believes is losing out. Publishing gets its streaming moment Kristelia García, who teaches copyright at Georgetown Law, compares the Anthropic settlement to the fight over Eminem's digital royalties. Producers sued a Universal Music Group subsidiary in 2007, arguing that downloads should pay a higher rate than records. That case settled in 2012. The parallel is in the paperwork. Most book contracts say nothing about a copyright settlement. They say nothing about revenue from technologies that nobody had built when the authors signed. The industry is "having that sort of streaming moment where their contracts didn't contemplate this," García said. What Anthropic still owes, and to whom Anthropic settled after a judge let the case go to trial, having found that stockpiling pirated books gave the authors a claim. The same ruling held that training Claude on books the company had bought legally was fair use. That finding is now the one every AI defendant cites, and it is why firms started buying up old books. The company pointed back to a statement from May. Its deputy general counsel, Aparna Sridhar, said then that more than 91% of authors and publishers had claimed their share. Anthropic wanted the matter closed. The ownership disputes surfaced after that. Its other copyright problems are live. Sony Music and Warner Chappell are suing over song lyrics in Claude's training data. In New York, Microsoft has told a court that Copilot almost never reproduces books, running the same fair use argument against news publishers and the Authors Guild. Anthropic's record settlement was meant to be the clean outcome, the one showing that rights holders could be paid. What it has produced first is 482,000 books, an arbitrator, and a lot of authors rereading contracts they signed before Claude existed.