Artificial intelligence firm, Anthropic has agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit brought by authors who claim their works were used without permission to train the company’s chatbot.

If a judge approves the landmark deal as early as Monday, it could signal a major shift in legal disputes between AI firms and creative professionals—including writers and visual artists—over alleged copyright violations.

Under the agreement, authors would receive roughly $3,000 for each of the estimated 500,000 books included in the settlement.

“As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors. “It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”

Three authors, thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, filed the lawsuit last year.

They now represent a wider group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic allegedly downloaded to train its chatbot, Claude.

In June, a federal judge issued a mixed ruling, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books was not illegal but that Anthropic had improperly obtained millions of books from piracy websites.

Experts say that if Anthropic had not reached a settlement, a loss at the planned December trial could have been even costlier for the San Francisco-based company.

“We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business,” said William Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.