Harry Potter publisher to receive millions in Anthropic copyright settlement

Bloomsbury, the publisher behind the Harry Potter books, is set to receive a multimillion-pound payout as part of a $1.5 billion copyright settlement involving AI startup Anthropic and thousands of authors, according to a monitored public feed from The Guardian Technology.

The settlement centers on claims that copyrighted books were used to help train chatbots. Under the proposed terms, Bloomsbury said it had 14,087 titles included in the agreement, with compensation of about $3,000 per title. That would place the company among the beneficiaries of the wide-reaching deal, which has drawn attention across the publishing and artificial intelligence sectors.

Bloomsbury’s catalogue includes work by JK Rowling, Sarah J. Maas and Susanna Clarke, making it one of the more prominent publishers named in the settlement summary. The payout reflects the scale of the agreement, which the feed says covers thousands of authors whose protected works were used in connection with Anthropic’s systems.

The case adds to growing legal and commercial pressure on AI developers over how training data is obtained and whether copyright holders should be paid when their material is used to develop generative tools. The settlement, as described in the feed, does not resolve the broader debate over the use of books and other published material in AI training, but it does create a substantial compensation package for those included.

For publishers, the deal could mark an important financial outcome in a dispute that has become central to the relationship between the creative industries and AI firms. For Anthropic, the agreement may help draw a line under a costly challenge involving claims from authors over the use of their work.

This report is based on a monitored public feed and attributed to The Guardian Technology.

Source: The Guardian Technology - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/22/bloomsbury-book-publisher-anthropic-copyright-settlement