The sum is gargantuan: $1.5 billion.
But as thousands of authors wait for their cut of the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history from Anthropic, the tech giant that used pirated books to train its artificial intelligence chatbot, some are accusing the publishers of their books of trying to squeeze them out of a percentage of the payout.
The haggling is coming into plain view as a settlement administrator attempts to clear up who owns the rights to some of the more than 482,000 books covered by the agreement in the class-action case, which was approved in July by a judge in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California.
For many of those titles, ownership is undisputed, but on repeated occasions, authors and publishers have staked competing claims with the settlement administrator, which began recently informing them of those discrepancies, said Mary Rasenberger, chief executive of the Authors Guild, a professional association that says it has more than 18,000 members.
In an interview on Thursday, Rasenberger said the settlement process was ripe for such misunderstandings.
“My big fear when this was all set up is that not all publishers keep great records of what books they’ve reverted rights to,” Rasenberger said. “And so you know, they should be taking it off their catalog.”
Rasenberger said she did not believe that publishers were acting in bad faith.
“I don’t see this as a grab by the publishers,” she said, adding, “I don’t think they’re specifically trying to screw any author over.”
Authors could receive up to $3,000 for each one of their books that a judge ruled last year were illegally downloaded and stored by Anthropic in the development of its online chatbot Claude.
But they must split the proceeds with publishers they granted book rights to and with co-authors, according to the Authors Guild, a trade group.
Rasenberger said the percentages were determined by a class-action council that sought input from the guild and publishers.
Textbook authors will receive far less — in some cases, 10 to 15 percent of the total — as determined by their contracts with their publishers, she said.
“It’s the textbooks where there are a lot of unhappy authors right now,” Rasenberger said.
April Henry, a New York Times best-selling author of more than 30 mysteries and thrillers for teens and adults, said she was baffled when she logged into the settlement claims portal to see that HarperCollins, her former publisher, had claimed partial ownership of her first book, “Circles of Confusion.”
Henry, 67, said in an interview on Thursday that the rights to the book, published in 1999, had reverted to her in 2007.
“I was like, well, that’s not right,” said Henry, echoing a complaint she made on social media on Wednesday.
Her agent provided her with a letter confirming that she owned the book’s rights that Henry said she uploaded to the portal. When she checked back in the portal, she said, she learned that she would receive the full $3,000 for that book.
“I don’t think Harper was deliberately trying to cheat,” she said.
HarperCollins declined to comment.
Henry said she has 22 titles on the list of books that Anthropic had illegally obtained, and that she expected to receive in the mid-$20,000 range after her publishers and co-authors collect their cut.
Having to share part of the settlement with a publisher was a source of frustration for Henry, who said she was first told that the payments could start flowing in August, only to hear that it might not happen until later this year.
Another author, Amy Lupold Bair, who has written guidebooks about blogging and how families can navigate the digital world, vented on social media over her potential diminishing share of the settlement.
“My publisher is fighting the default 50/50 payout split from the Anthropic class action settlement,” she wrote on Threads. “They only want me, the author whose entire work was stolen, to get 10%. So that’s a fun email to wake up to.”
Her post, which did not name the publisher, received more than 1,000 likes and started a lengthy discussion about the settlement process.
She declined to comment.
John Wiley & Sons Inc., which was listed as the publisher for two of her books on her website, “Raising Digital Families for Dummies” and “Blogging for Dummies,” did not address whether it was seeking a 90 percent cut.
In a statement on Friday, a representative for the company said that it was following the settlement terms when it filed claims for “all Wiley-published” works covered by the Anthropic agreement.
Allocations for educational titles were set by individual contracts, said the representative, which did not immediately say whether Wiley put its Dummies guidebook series in that category.
The Association of American Publishers, a trade group that represents most of the major publishing houses in the United States and has hundreds of members, did not immediately provide a comment on Friday.
In 2024, a group of authors filed a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic after learning that the company, seeking huge amounts of digital text needed to train A.I. technologies, had used their work without paying for it and stockpiled millions of pirated books.
Anthropic chose to settle the case after a judge paved the way for the case to go to trial, finding that the company’s stealing of books had given the plaintiffs cause.
At the same time, the judge said that the company’s training of its chatbot with books that it had legally acquired was a “fair use.”
Anthropic referred to a statement in May by Aparna Sridhar, the company’s deputy general counsel, as the settlement was going through final approval.
“We are pleased that more than 91 percent of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment, and we’re looking forward to bringing this matter to a close,” the statement said.
JND Legal Administration, the settlement administrator, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday. Neither did a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the case.
Kristelia García, a professor at Georgetown Law who specializes in copyright law, said the dynamics of divvying up the Anthropic settlement funds were reminiscent of a 2007 federal lawsuit over the distribution of digital royalties for the music of the rapper Eminem.
Producers who discovered Eminem sued a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group and argued that they should receive a higher percentage of royalties from downloads at iTunes and other digital stores.
The two sides reached a settlement in 2012.
Not all book contracts have language about who is entitled to settlement payments in copyright infringement cases or revenues from emerging technologies, including A.I., García said.
“So I think this is just kind of the publishing industry having that sort of streaming moment where their contracts didn’t contemplate this,” she said.
Muddying the settlement process further, according to the Authors Guild, are more recent book ownership changes.
Rasenberger said an author contacted the guild this week with a dilemma: Rights to the books had reverted to the author this year.
“It depends on who owned the rights when the books were downloaded when the infringement happened, which is, you know, 2021 and ’22,” Rasenberger said.
In instances when ownership disputes remain unresolved, Rasenberger said, a court-appointed arbitrator will have the final say, but she added the guild “will fight tooth and nail for them if they are, in fact, being screwed over.”
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