The Literature Translation Institute of Korea says 21 English-language books by Korean authors appear on Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement list, but inclusion does not establish that any was used to train Claude.
Yonhap News Agency and The Korea Herald reported the finding and said the institute had notified the writers. The books they named include Human Acts by 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Han Kang, Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-sook and The Guest by Hwang Sok-yong.
The settlement covers listed books found in versions of Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror that Anthropic downloaded. It provides a fund for eligible copyright owners. The list identifies works covered by the agreement; it does not identify which books entered a model's training material.
Anthropic represented in the agreement that neither downloaded pirate-library dataset, nor any part of either, was used to train a commercially released model. That statement concerns those datasets and does not establish whether copies of the same books entered training from another source.
A June 23, 2025, ruling on Anthropic's book library treated model training and the storage of pirated books separately. The federal judge found the training use at issue was fair use but rejected that defense for pirated copies kept in a central library. The ruling said Anthropic selected subsets of its library for training, but it did not specify whether any of the Korean titles were included.
A California federal court approved the settlement on July 20, covering 482,460 works. Under the agreement, neither side conceded whether Anthropic acted lawfully in downloading or training on the listed books.
The court estimated about $3,000 per work before fees and costs. More than one copyright owner may share a work's proceeds, so that estimate is not a guaranteed payment to an individual author. Anthropic is funding the settlement.
The deadline to submit claims was March 30. The settlement administrator expects to begin payments by Nov. 15 for works with resolved ownership shares and complete payment information.
