Textbook Authors Tell Court the Anthropic Settlement Split Is Unfair

Textbook and academic authors say the process for claiming their share of Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement is leaving many of them out of pocket. In a letter to the court, Kim Pawlak, executive director of the Textbook and Academic Authors Association (TAA), set out members' complaints about the claims process and about how the money is being divided. Publishing Perspectives reported on the letter on 30 October 2026.

The settlement is a class action, meaning one lawsuit brought on behalf of a large group of people. A federal judge approved it in July, and Reuters reported that it is the largest known settlement in a US copyright case. The same judge also cut the plaintiffs' legal fees sharply, rejecting what he called a "windfall" for lawyers, according to Reuters.

The trouble, according to Pawlak, starts with how money is split between authors and publishers. Most of the people contacting TAA are textbook, or educational, authors. Their books do not get the default 50-50 split that applies to trade books (general-interest titles) and academic works. Pawlak said publishers in many cases claimed 85% to 95% of the settlement proceeds for a single work.

Authors may be entitled to 100% in some cases, she said. One example is an out-of-print book whose rights have reverted, meaning the rights have passed back to the author because the publisher no longer sells it.

Authors with disputed claims, she reported, were told they must "meet and confer" with their publisher to settle the matter. That is a request to sit down and work it out with the same company they are disputing with. Pawlak also said the settlement claims portal has been riddled with technical and functionality problems.

TAA is a nonprofit that represents about 4,000 textbook and academic authors. Pawlak filed the letter and its exhibits with the court on 26 October. It came with several letters from individual authors describing their own experiences with the process. She also volunteered to testify, and asked the court to recognise the burden that falls on authors when they face better-resourced publishers in the claims process.

The dispute over guidance is not new. In January, Publishing Perspectives reported that Sage Publishing agreed to send a "corrective email" to authors about the settlement, after questions were raised about information it had given them.

For authors waiting on a payment, the questions are concrete: who gets what share of each work, and how an author proves a claim through a system that is not working smoothly.