Writers say some publishers and literary agents are filing for money they may not be entitled to under Anthropic’s copyright settlement.
Authors expecting checks from Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement are now finding something else in their inboxes: notices that someone else has made a claim on their money.
The dispute is landing just as the settlement, approved in July, starts moving toward payment. Under the deal, authors of nearly 500,000 books are set to receive $3,000 for each pirated work. But the money is not always going straight to the writer. If a title is still in print with a traditional publisher, the payment is split 50-50 between author and publisher. If the book was self-published, or if rights reverted after the book went out of print, the author is supposed to receive the full amount.
Claims are coming in from publishers that may no longer hold rights
That structure is now creating friction. Writers have been posting on social media that publishers are claiming a share of payments on books they no longer control. Mystery and thriller author April Henry said HarperCollins claimed one of her books even though it reverted “at least 17 years ago.” She also said she received a credit alert saying the publisher had been added as her employer, which she said never happened.
Victoria Strauss, who runs the Writers Beware blog, said she has been hearing from authors with complaints that fall into two buckets: publishers seeking money for books they no longer have a legitimate claim on, and publishers seeking 100% of a payment when they should only be entitled to half.
Strauss said she is “reluctant to attribute to malice what can be plausibly explained by poor recordkeeping,” and noted that some publishers have already said the claims were mistakes and that they have asked Anthropic to correct them. Mary Rasenberger, chief executive of the Authors Guild, told The New York Times she does not see this as “a grab by the publishers” and does not believe publishers are “specifically trying to screw any author over.” Her view: the mess is what happens when old records meet a complicated settlement process.
Agents are filing claims too
Publishers are not the only ones drawing fire. Strauss said she has also received complaints that some literary agencies are making claims on the settlement, which she called surprising because “agents are not rightsholders in the books that they sell.”
Author Courtney Milan, the pen name of former law clerk and law professor Heidi Bond, was less restrained. In a Bluesky post, she wrote: “Apparently some agents are trying to claim percentages on the Anthropic settlement, and I do not REMOTELY think they should do this, what the fuck, stop that shit!”
The complaints point to a basic problem in the settlement’s administration: figuring out who owns what, and when. That matters because a rights reversion has to have happened before August 10, 2022 — the settlement’s “download date” — for an author to make a 100% claim on a book.
Authors are being told to challenge bad allocations
Strauss said the reports she has seen are only “a peek through a small crack in a massive wall,” but she also said the volume and repetition of complaints suggest the issue may be broader than a few isolated errors.
That is the part authors are now being told to watch closely. The settlement process gives them a path to dispute payment allocations, and the Authors Guild has shared guidance on how to do it. For writers whose rights reverted years ago, or whose books were self-published, the difference between a clean claim and a bad one is the difference between getting paid and watching someone else take a cut.
Anthropic’s settlement was supposed to close one chapter in the fight over AI training and copyrighted books. Instead, it has opened another one: who actually gets the money when the paper trail is old, the rights history is messy, and the claims start arriving all at once.
