The agreement does not include an admission of liability. Writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed the class action against Anthropic last year. They argued that the company, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, unlawfully used millions of pirated books to teach its AI assistant Claude to respond to human prompts.

The settlement is the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright cases and could lead more A.I. companies to pay rights holders for use of their works.