Authors push back as publishers and agents seek share of Anthropic settlement

Some authors expecting money from Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement got an unwelcome surprise this week: emails saying someone else had also claimed their payment. The settlement comes out of a class action over AI training data. A judge had already said training on copyrighted works can count as fair use, but pirating those works does not. Final approval landed in July, and the money is now moving.

The deal covers nearly 500,000 titles. Each pirated work is supposed to pay out $3,000. If a book is still in print with a traditional publisher, the settlement says that payment should be split evenly between author and publisher. If the book was self-published, or if the rights had reverted because it went out of print, the author should get the full amount.

That simple formula has not looked so simple in practice. Mystery and thriller author April Henry said HarperCollins claimed one of her books even though the rights had reverted years ago, and she also got a notification saying the publisher had been added as her employer, which she said never happened. At Writers Beware, Victoria Strauss said she has heard two kinds of complaints: publishers claiming money on books they no longer have rights to, and publishers claiming 100% when they should only get 50%.

Strauss said she’s hesitant to call it malice when bad recordkeeping could explain it, and she noted that some publishers have already said they’re asking Anthropic to fix mistakes. Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told The New York Times she doesn’t see a grab by publishers either, calling this more like the predictable mess that comes from poor records and a confusing claims process. But Strauss also said the volume and repetition of complaints over just two days suggests something broader than random glitches.

Publishers are not the only ones drawing side-eye. Strauss said she has also heard complaints about literary agencies making claims, even though agents are not rightsholders in the books they sell. Author Courtney Milan was blunter, blasting agents who tried to take percentages from the settlement and saying they should stop. The Authors Guild and Milan also pointed authors to the dispute process, including one important cutoff: to claim 100% on a reverted book, the rights had to revert before August 10, 2022, the settlement’s download date.