Hey, Anthropic owes me $9000! They illegally used at least 3 of my books on LibGen to create Claude. Now they're paying a $1.5 billion settlement, at $3000 per book. See if *your* books are on the list:

https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/

If so, you have until March 23, 2026 to file a claim. The above website lets you file a claim, but this one explains everything more clearly:

https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/what-authors-need-to-know-about-the-anthropic-settlement/#next-steps

Actually I exaggerated: the payment will be split between authors and publishers, but I have to make the claim - so the settlement is making me do some work my publisher should be doing for me. My coauthors and I will just get half, $4500. One of these books has 2 coauthors, one has 3, and one is a book I edited, with essays by lots of authors. So $1000 is a more realistic estimate of what I get. Oh well.

Bizarrely, my most popular book, Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity, is not on the list. But I guess it's not surprising:

"The settlement agreement discloses that approximately 500,000 titles out of the 7 million copies of books that Anthropic reportedly downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi meet the definition required to be part of the class."

Only books whose copyright is registered with the US Library of Congress meet that defiinition!

If you have a book on the list, you can opt out of the current settlement and join future lawsuits. But you have to take action to do that!!! For more information on that, see item 40 here:

https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/faq

Homepage | Bartz v Anthropic Settlement Site

@johncarlosbaez
> Bizarrely, my most popular book, Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity, is not on the list.

Clearly you should raise its price to the general public to $1000 to $3000, since that's now the going rate for your books.

@dougmerritt - I suspect most readers get my books free from LibGen, just like Anthropic did. And I'm fine with that, since I didn't write books to make money: I just felt I needed a publisher to distribute them. My two most recent books, I just give away for free.

Except to people named Claude.

@johncarlosbaez I love LibGen because when I was doing obscure theatre research there were some out of print books that the library didn't have that I just needed a cursory glance at

it's nice to see someone advocating for authors getting their due vs Anthropic without also saying LibGen should be shut down