The $1.5 billion settlement by Anthropic over the use of the works of authors to train AI is back on the table. In early September, the record setting agreement was announced by Anthropic and lawyers representing authors but that agreement was rejected by the judge for the case due to multiple concerns.

Now, U.S. District Judge William Alsup has called the class-action settlement “fair” during a hearing that took place on Thursday.

The next step is to notify the affected authors and give them a chance to file claims.

Anthropic is accused of using millions of pirated of books to teach its AI assistant Claude to respond to prompts.

The case has been interesting as Anthropic had been cleared from some of its wrongdoing with the judge ruling that training their model on purchased work was “exceedingly transformative.” Where Anthropic ran into issues was its use of pirated material in that training. About 7 million pirated books were saved to a “central library.”

As reported earlier, the settlement would cover anything done before a certain date but any new infractions after could lead to further lawsuits. Anthropic would also destroy the datasets used in its models. The settlement would amount to about $3,000 per class work.

A trial was set to begin in December over the piracy. Potential damages would have been in the hundreds of billions of dollars.