Harry Potter publisher set for Anthropic settlement payout

Bloomsbury Publishing, the British publisher of the Harry Potter series, is set to receive a multimillion-dollar payout under a record $1.5 billion copyright settlement approved this week by a US federal court involving artificial intelligence firm Anthropic.

The US District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval to the agreement on July 20, resolving claims that Anthropic obtained millions of pirated books to develop its Claude AI models.

AI training dispute

Anthropic has denied wrongdoing and maintained that using copyrighted works to train its systems was protected by the fair-use doctrine, though the settlement does not constitute an admission of liability.

The settlement stems from a 2024 lawsuit filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of downloading large numbers of copyrighted books from unauthorized online repositories to train its AI models.

Payout structure

In a statement on Wednesday, Bloomsbury confirmed its status as a major beneficiary under the class-action agreement, with court documents listing 14,087 of the company's titles eligible for compensation.

Each qualifying work is expected to receive approximately $3,000 before legal fees and other costs, with the payout generally divided equally between the publisher and the author, according to the court filings.

Payments to rights holders, including Bloomsbury, are expected to be made in installments, with the first likely to arrive in the second half of the company's financial year.