AI company Anthropic has agreed to settle a lawsuit from authors. The cost: $1.5 billion.

A judge still needs to approve the settlement, but lawyers representing the group of authors celebrated the major update in the case.

"As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever," Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors, told the Associated Press . "It is the first of its kind in the AI era."

The authors' class-action lawsuit argued that Anthropic took pirated copies of the book to train its AI chatbot, Claude. The lawsuit covered about 500,000 works, meaning the total payout could come in around $3,000 per work, should the settlement be approved.

Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, emphasized to Ars Technica in a statement that the court found "Anthropic’

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