Authors fight publisher and agent claims on Anthropic's $1.5B settlement payouts

Authors in line for money from Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement opened their inboxes this week to find that publishers, and in some cases literary agents, were claiming a portion of their payments, TechCrunch reports.

The payments stem from a class action that Anthropic settled last year. The underlying case produced a notable ruling: training AI models on copyrighted books counts as fair use, but obtaining pirated copies of those books does not. The deal received final approval in July, clearing the way for payouts to begin.

How the payouts are structured

Under the settlement's terms, authors of nearly 500,000 titles are to receive $3,000 for each pirated work. The split depends on the book's status. Titles still in print with a traditional publisher are divided evenly between author and publisher. Self-published books, and books where the publisher let the work go out of print and thereby reverted the rights, should be paid entirely to the author.

The claims authors are disputing

On social media, writers have described publishers claiming more than they appear entitled to. Mystery and thriller author April Henry said HarperCollins claimed a book whose rights had reverted at least 17 years earlier, and that on the same day she received a credit alert naming the publisher as her employer, a relationship she says never existed.

Victoria Strauss, who runs the blog Writers Beware, told TechCrunch she has received complaints falling into two broad buckets: publishers seeking payment for books they no longer hold rights to because the rights reverted, and publishers requesting the full 100% of a payment when the settlement entitles them to only half.

Agents enter the fray

Publishers are not the only parties filing claims. Strauss said several literary agencies are also seeking a share, which she found surprising because agents do not hold rights to the books they sell. Author Courtney Milan, the pen name of former law clerk and law professor Heidi Bond, was blunter in a Bluesky post, arguing agents have no business claiming a percentage of the settlement and demanding they stop.

Sloppy records or something worse

Neither Strauss nor the Authors Guild is ready to call this a deliberate money grab. Strauss said she is hesitant to assume bad intent when disorganized recordkeeping can plausibly explain the errors, and noted that some publishers have already acknowledged mistakes and asked Anthropic to correct them. Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told The New York Times she does not view the situation as a grab by publishers or an attempt to shortchange any author, attributing the problem instead to poor recordkeeping and a confusing settlement process.

Strauss nevertheless flagged the scale of the reports. Any complaints reaching her blog, she cautioned, offer only a narrow view of a very large operation. But the unusually high volume arriving over two days, combined with authors reporting the same errors again and again, suggests to her a widespread and systemic problem rather than the routine glitches a large operation might be expected to produce.

How authors can push back

Milan and the Authors Guild have circulated guidance on how authors can dispute their payment allocations. One wrinkle complicates those disputes: to claim a full payment for a book, an author must show the rights reverted before August 10, 2022, the date the settlement designates as its download date.

Why it matters

Anthropic's settlement is one of the first major monetary remedies tied to pirated books used in AI training, and its administration is now a test case for whether such money actually reaches creators. A $1.5 billion fund means little to an author whose payment is halved or absorbed by an erroneous claim, and the dispute process hinges on records, such as reversion dates, that publishers themselves demonstrably struggle to keep accurate. If comparable settlements follow for other AI developers, the quality of rights-tracking infrastructure, rather than the headline number, may determine how much of the money ends up with the writers it was meant to compensate.