SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday approved a $1.5 billion settlement between artificial intelligence company Anthropic and authors who allege nearly half a million books had been illegally pirated to train chatbots.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the preliminary approval in San Francisco federal court Thursday after the two sides worked to address his concerns about the settlement, which will pay authors and publishers about $3,000 for each of the books covered by the agreement. It does not apply to future works.

“This is a fair settlement,” Alsup said, though he added that distributing it to all parties will be “complicated.” About 465,000 books are on the list of works pirated by Anthropic, according to Justin Nelson, an attorney for the authors.

“We have some

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