Some authors expecting a share of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement received emails this week informing them that other individuals or entities were claiming rights to their payments. Anthropic settled the class-action lawsuit last year, after it was ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted materials was legal under “fair use,” while obtaining those materials through piracy was illegal. The settlement was finalized in July.
Under the agreement, the authors of approximately 500,000 works will be paid $3,000 for each work used in piracy. If a book is still in print through a traditional publisher, the payment will be split 50-50 between the author and publisher. If the book was self-published or the publisher returned the rights to the author by allowing the work to go out of print, the full payment will go to the author.
Authors say some publishers have filed claims for works whose rights they no longer hold, or have claimed 100% of the payment when they should receive only 50%. Mystery and thriller author April Henry wrote that HarperCollins had filed a claim for a book whose rights had reverted to her at least 17 years ago, and that she had received a notification the same day identifying the publisher as her employer.
Victoria Strauss, the author of Writers Beware, said she had received numerous similar complaints and reported that some publishers had asked Anthropic to make corrections, saying the errors stemmed from record-keeping problems and the complex settlement process. Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger also said she did not believe this was an attempt by publishers to take a share from authors. Strauss, however, said the recurring errors could point to a more widespread and systemic problem than ordinary technical glitches.
Strauss also reported that some literary agencies had requested payment. Courtney Milan and Authors Guild shared ways for authors to challenge the payments. For 100% to be claimed for a work, the transfer of rights must have taken place before August 10, 2022.
Why it matters
This development shows that not only whether a work is copyrighted but also who held the rights during the relevant period is decisive in the distribution of the settlement money. The accuracy of the records directly affects the amount owed to the owners of works whose rights reverted from the publisher to the author, which were self-published, or which had been taken out of print by the publisher. Disputes over publisher and agency claims raise the question of how reliably the settlement process can verify authors’ rights status. It is not yet clear whether the errors are isolated record-keeping problems or the result of a more widespread practice. For this reason, how the avenues for challenging the payments will work and how disputes over rights ownership will affect payments are emerging as the process’s critical issues going forward.
Background
Anthropic is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: over the last 90 days, we have published 6 articles mentioning the name; the latest is dated September 6, 2026.