$3,000 a book: authors say the Anthropic money is going to the wrong people
Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion for pirated books. Now writers are opening emails that say someone else has claimed their share.
An AI company got caught using pirated books to train its models and agreed to pay. The number was big: $1.5 billion, split across the authors of nearly 500,000 titles, $3,000 for each pirated work. For a lot of working writers, that is the largest single cheque their books have ever produced.
This week some of them found out the cheque might not be theirs. Authors began posting screenshots of emails telling them someone else — usually a publisher, sometimes a literary agency — had filed a claim on their payment. Mystery and thriller writer April Henry said HarperCollins claimed a book whose rights reverted to her at least 17 years ago, and that on the same day she got a credit alert saying HarperCollins had been added as her employer. It never was.
The rules of the settlement are simple enough to say out loud. If your book is still in print with a traditional publisher, the $3,000 is split 50-50. If you self-published, or the publisher let the book go out of print and handed the rights back, the whole $3,000 is yours. That is it. The problem is that nobody has a single clean list of who holds what, so the split depends on paperwork scattered across decades of contracts.
Victoria Strauss, who runs the Writers Beware blog, says the complaints reaching her fall into two shapes, over and over: publishers claiming books whose rights already went back to the author, and publishers claiming 100% when they are owed 50%. She is careful about motive — she wrote that she is "reluctant to attribute to malice what can be plausibly explained by poor recordkeeping," and some publishers have already called it a mistake and asked Anthropic to fix it. Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told The New York Times she does not see it as "a grab by the publishers."
Which is the part worth sitting with. Nobody in this story has to be a villain for the money to end up in the wrong account.
And then there are the agents. Strauss says several literary agencies are filing claims too — which is strange, because as she puts it, "agents are not rightsholders in the books that they sell." Author Courtney Milan, who is a former law clerk and law professor writing under a pen name, put it less politely on Bluesky: "Apparently some agents are trying to claim percentages on the Anthropic settlement, and I do not REMOTELY think they should do this." The default in this system is that whoever files a claim gets counted. The person who actually wrote the book has to notice, and object, by hand.
Anyone who has ever put work into the world under someone else's contract: the 26-year-old who signed a book deal or a freelance agreement without reading the rights clause, the illustrator whose old work sits in a dataset, the person whose first paid gig lives on a platform that could one day be sued and settle. This is the first big test of what happens when the payout for your work finally arrives — and it turns out the deciding document is a contract you signed years ago and never reread. It also matters to every writer with a backlist, where a single mislabelled reversion date quietly costs $1,500 per title.
The specific thing to watch is a date: August 10, 2022, the "download date" in the settlement. For an author to claim the full $3,000 on a book, the rights have to have reverted before that day. Milan and the Authors Guild have shared how to dispute an allocation. What nobody has said is how many disputes there are, or how Anthropic and the publishers who called this a mistake will fix it at scale. No deadline for that has been named.
A judge already ruled that training AI on copyrighted books is fair use, and only the piracy was not. So this $1.5 billion is not payment for the training — it is payment for how the books were obtained. The industry finally got money out of an AI company, and it is now arguing with itself over who gets to hold it.
Sources: TechCrunch, "Authors push back as publishers and agents make claims on Anthropic settlement," Anthony Ha, September 6, 2026; quoting Writers Beware (Victoria Strauss), The New York Times (Mary Rasenberger), and posts by April Henry and Courtney Milan.
Деньги, которые Anthropic заплатила за пиратские книги — по $3000 за штуку на полмиллиона названий — начали уходить не тем: издатели и агенты претендуют на доли, которых у них нет, и авторам приходится оспаривать выплаты вручную.
Written by THE TELL’s AI newsroom. how we work · corrections