Tenth Update (Sept 15):
The judge gave permission for the class lawyers to update the Anthropic class action website. It should, once changed, reflect the current status of the settlement, which is try to correct allocations, send them into the void. and never hear anything back.
The Author’s Guild has an updated advice list for authors. It is helpful, but…the real problem is we don’t know what’s happening in the background. Numerous authors on Bluesky have noted they’ve made corrections to allocations and nothing is happening.
I updated allocations on seven of my books two weeks ago (tomorrow), which should have easily resolved the discrepancies with them. Crickets, though.
Ninth update (Sept 12):
The class action lawyers have finally come out with their request to the judge to modify the settlement website. You can read their requested change in this court document.
Don’t expect much. The main change is that they’ve extended that original 30 day preliminary allocation work time to 60 days.
If you send a message to info@anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com, you’ll now get the following auto message:
Thank you for contacting the Anthropic Copyright Settlement Administrator. We are reviewing your message.Answers to common questions are provided below.How and when will I get a payment?For works where all rightsholders are in agreement and where all necessary payment information is provided, it is currently estimated that payments will be sent by November 15, 2026. Payments will be made in installments. The first installment is expected to be about 70% of the total award for each work.Payments will be issued consistent with the payment method you chose on your claim submission. You can use the Update Information Form to change your payment details.Where can I find my Claim Number and PIN?Your Claim Number and PIN are included in the email notice you received containing the link to the Allocation Portal. You will find your Claim Number and PIN at the top of the email.How do I use the Allocation Portal?Please review the Allocation Portal Instructions.Why did my notice ask me to request my claim summary by email?If your claim includes more than 50 works, we will provide your claim summary in a spreadsheet format that will be easier to review and update.What if I cannot or do not want to provide my U.S. Taxpayer Identification Number?You are not required to provide a TIN to submit your Allocation Form. When you get the TIN message, please choose “Proceed Anyway.”
Am I required to provide supporting documentation?You are not required to provide supporting documentation. If documentation is needed to support your claimed allocation, we will reach out to you.I am not sure how to allocate the payment for a work.To update the allocation for a work, you must either choose “Default” OR provide a percentage for each confirmed rightsholder. The total combined percentage for all rightsholders must add up to 100%.
Eighth update (Sept 10):
Courtney Milan did a great piece on how translators should figure into the settlement.
Leading us to wonder: why isn’t this information being published by the class lawyers? Why are we dependent on folks like Courtney Milan to do their work for them?
Will they actually compensate her for doing the work they should have done?
Seventh Update (Sept 9):
Courtney Milan caught another important issue related to the settlement process, this one for self-published works with multiple authors.
You really have to go through hoops for this one.
If you had co-authors and are self-published and said ‘default’, 50% of the claim went to a nonexistent publisher. To fix, you and all your co-workers will have to adjust the allocation, selecting alternative, setting the royalty percentage manually, and then attaching a document—named something different for each book—explaining why you’re doing what you’re doing.
This demonstrates what I’ve been seeing with all the problems people are having with the system: the class lawyers and claim admin folks have only talked to publishers when designing the system. AND have given publishers precedence in decision making.
Authors who are members of the class in the Anthropic Settlement, please be aware that if you have a work in the settlement which has multiple authors but is self-published (or the rights have reverted), the settlement allocation is buggy.Explanation below
— Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan.com) 2026-09-08T21:17:40.000Z
Sixth Update (Sept 8):
At least one agency has come out to say they have not submitted claims, and are not trying to take a cut of any author action.
Fifth update (Sept 6):
Another hand stretched out, heard from.
The hands in this case belong to people and organizations that ‘buy’ class action or other legal action claims. If you get injured in a car wreck and your judgement is paid out over time, you will hear from them.
Surprisingly they jumped on the Anthropic settlement, as Victoria notes:
Anthropic settlement shenanigans: a thread 🧵Authors are reporting receiving emails like this one. 1/5
— Victoria Strauss (@victoriastrauss.com) 2026-09-06T17:03:31.988Z
I say surprisingly, because as complicated as the settlement process looks to be, authors/publishers will get paid. And the 70% payments are likely to come within six months. Not the type of payout that would attract these types of bottom dwe…urh…businesses.
Also wanted to emphasize that if your publisher wants 85% or more of the settlement amount, it really might be in your interest to take this one to the Master. As Courtney Milan notes, they’re treating the settlement like a royalty, and it’s not.
So if I were an author, and my contract did not contain an explicit split for infringement actions, I would absolutely dispute a publisher who claimed, based on royalty numbers, that I was only eligible for 12%.
— Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan.com) 2026-09-06T19:29:16.365Z
At worst, your payment is delayed. At best, the Master agrees with you. And best of all, the publisher may decide the fight isn’t worth it and back off the money grab.
Even at 50%, this settlement is a windfall for publishers.
Fourth update (Sept 6):
I did receive a reply to my emails to the claims administrator:
Dear Shelly,
Thank you for your email as well as your attentiveness in these next steps.
Note that the Allocation column keeps the data that originally started the disagreement, while the Updated Allocation column is the position you assert going forward.
Allocation percentages will be updated after the allocation process is complete and all required submissions have been received and reviewed. Any changes you submit through the works allocation page are recorded for consideration during this process. If you return to the portal and do not see your updated allocation percentages, this does not necessarily mean that your submission was not received. If you received a “Success” page after submitting your updates, then nothing further is needed from you at this time. Please keep a copy of your “Success” page for your records.
Regards,
Anthropic Copyright Settlement Administrator
I would have felt a tad better if they had gotten the correct spelling of my name. And this does seem to imply that there will NOT be an email acknowledging the submission, as I was told by the ‘expedited’ individual I spoke to at the JND.
Trying to deduce what’s happening with such meager information is a challenge, but my read is that the background process requires that every party must submit something and when all parties have submitted something, some magic happens and either it falls into the uncontested category or advances to the next round.
We still don’t fully understand what happens when you don’t agree with an ‘uncontested’ allocation. I suspect, though, that there are going to be at least some payments to people and organizations who don’t have rights to the payments.
Third update (Sept 5):
Victoria Strauss in her post, listed below, just named literary agencies attempting to grab some of the Anthropic settlement funds.
Among the agencies:
The Wylie Agency
Malatesta Literary Agency
L. Perkins Agency
Global Lion Intellectual Property (formerly PMA Literary)
Jeanne Fredericks Literary Agency
Sanford J. Greenburger
Dystel Goderich & Bourret
Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency
Waterside Productions
Romance authors are on the warpath about this.
So you should have gotten access to an allocation portal so that you can dispute the transaction.The thing I would do is:(1) write a narrative saying that this is an agency that represented you, but the agency is not a rights holder in the work, and the agent should be allocated 0%
— Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan.com) 2026-09-05T18:19:23.071Z
Advice: never piss off a romance author.
The Author’s Guild and The Textbook and Academic Authors Association both have updates on the ongoing allocation process. The latter has especially helpful information for you getting hit with the 85/15 or so ‘educational’ split from publishers like Pearson.
Second update (Sept 4):
Another issue that came up is the the settlement form asking folks for an SSN or TIN. This is a problem for authors who are not US citizens.
From Bluesky, Oisín McGann provided some helpful advice for non-US authors.
Had a short conversation with one of the people working on the Anthropic Settlement about the Disagreements form. If, like me, you don't have a US tax reference or social security number, you can email them to say you can't complete the form on the portal. 1/2
— Oisín McGann (@oisinmcgann.bsky.social) 2026-09-03T17:00:36.033Z
In addition, Victoria Strauss has done an excellent job documenting the issues associated with publishers seemingly insatiable quest to consume as much of the settlement as possible.
Cue the theme from Jaws.
My post from earlier today about the craziness around Anthropic claim notices, updated with both of the notices writers are receiving, and a list of literary agents who are trying to claim a share of payouts writerbeware.blog/2026/09/04/a…
— Victoria Strauss (@victoriastrauss.com) 2026-09-05T00:29:44.331Z
And no, the allocation page for my books still does not show any of the updates or corrections I added, and still shows an incorrect listing of contested and uncontested books.
And no, I still have not received a reply to my emails.
First Update (Sept 4):
I had a disturbingly unproductive phone conversation with someone in the ‘expedited’ department at the claims administration, JND.
I asked what happens once I submit the form. He doesn’t know. We’re supposed to get an email confirming the submission if it was successful but I have not.
He doesn’t know the procedure that would take a book from the disagreement section to the agreement, and the reverse. He has no idea if there’s anything programatically that would alter the state.
He took notes, recommended I send an email with concerns, but couldn’t even answer if the corrections I made actually were made. We’re supposed to just….what, he had no idea, and now I have no idea.
This company had time to work this problem. No excuse for such poor documentation, systems, and understanding of what happens.
Earlier:
This week, the lawyers and claims administrator behind the Anthropic class action for authors finally started communicating with folks. They have started sending emails to people with links where the people can see lists of their books, if the allocation for the books is uncontested, and a way to adjust the allocation if it is contested.
And all hell is breaking loose.
For one, it seems there are some very greedy publishers out there. They’re either trying to take 100% of the claim, or they’re making claims on works that have reverted entirely to the authors.
Courtney Milan has been outlining in Bluesky what she’s done in her with one of her books, but it’s something she should not have to do. Why? Because the administrator of the claims should be providing something more than a few paragraphs thrown together in a beer and pizza midnight session.
Hi! Anthropic Q&A re:rights reversion and publisher claims. This is not legal advice; I can't give you legal advice. What I can do is tell you what I would do under certain circumstances.
— Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan.com) 2026-09-03T12:02:48.886Z
Instead of providing instructions that explain what to do in specific instances, such as uploading reversion letters if the rights have reverted, we have online instructions that seem to reflect an attitude that every written word costs the claims administrator actual money, so brevity hasn’t just been applied, it’s been tortured.
Then we’re faced with a primitive online system where you can update allocations, and supposedly put in what you think the allocations should be and then initiate a dialog with other authors and publishers. Except…
When you put in updates and access the form at a later time, seemingly none of the updates you put in are reflected. And the supposed checkbox which you would check to allow others to see your contact information, isn’t there.
In my case, I and my publisher agree on the split, but they show me claiming 100% on several books because of an early error in the claims process (see earlier mention, primitive systems). OK, no problem, I’ve got this.
I just go in, update the allocation to show that my split should be the default (50% to me, 50% to the publisher), submit it, everything seems fine…but nothing seems to take.
If I access the books list again, it still shows these books in contention, it doesn’t show my changes, and I have no idea what I need to do next nor do I know what’s happening in the system, because the claims administrator decided we really didn’t need documentation about how this whole resolution process is supposed to work.
When I submitted my adjusted allocation, even though it corrects the supposed contention, does it still have to go to the publisher to get an official okee dokee? What do they see that would make this so, because the forms I’m seeing don’t have an official ‘okee dokee’ checkbox next to the titles.
I have several emails into the administrator with questions, and will update here if I get anything back. I’ll also call at 8:30 when the claims administrator office opens…when I can figure out the time zone since the message system doesn’t give this (assuming PDT).
Perhaps the claims administrator should have used Claude to create everything. Then again, perhaps the claims administrator did use Claude to create everything.