The NewYorkTimes.com reported that “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 September 5, 2026 article entitled “Authors Wrangle With Publishers Over $1.5 Billion Anthropic A.I. Settlement” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/books/anthropic-settlement-ai-copyright-books.html) included these comments from Reporter Neil Vigdor:
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.
Time will tell!
First published at https://www.vogelitlaw.com/blog/nbsp15-billion-settlement-between-anthropic-and-publishers-is-still-now-resolved-yet