A federal judge on Thursday preliminarily approved Anthropic's offer to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit with a group of authors, in what will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought last year by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. It alleged that Anthropic illegally downloaded books from pirated databases like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.

"We are grateful for the Court's action today, which brings us one step closer to real accountability for Anthropic and puts all AI companies on notice they can't shortcut the law or override creators' rights," the authors said in a joint statement Thursday.

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