Bloomsbury Publishing said it will receive payments from the $1.5bn settlement between AI company Anthropic and copyright holders after a US court approved the agreement covering the unauthorised use of books to train AI models.

The FSTE 250 publisher told the London Stock Exchange (LSE) that 14,087 of its titles are included in the settlement. Compensation is expected to average around $3,000 per title, before legal fees and other costs, with payments split equally between authors and publishers.

Based on the proposed settlement terms, the gross value attributable to Bloomsbury titles is around $42m before deductions, although the company did not disclose the exact amount it expects to receive.

Settlement payments are expected to begin in the second half of Bloomsbury's current financial year and will be made in several instalments. For the most recent reported financial year, the company's revenue amounted to around £326m.

This settlement is noteworthy because it is one of the first major AI copyright cases to reach a financial resolution. Many lawsuits are currently pending against AI companies including OpenAI, Meta and Google over the use of copyrighted material for model training. This Anthropic case is significant because it is one of the first major cases to result in a large-scale payout rather than years of continued litigation.

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