'The Good Nurse' author wins $6,200 from Anthropic for stealing his books — but the years of fighting have made him 'much poorer'

The author of the bestselling true crime book The Good Nurse — along with fellow writers Andrea Bartz and Kirk Wallace Johnson — were among those whose lawsuit led Claude maker Anthropic to agree to a $1.5 billion settlement in July, roughly two years after the authors sued the company.

But the agreement was only a partial victory. On a personal level, Graeber said it came at a steep cost.

Lawyers will get a portion of the settlement while thousands of authors will split what’s left.

Graeber said he’ll receive $3,100 for each of the two books Anthropic used without authorization to train the large language model behind the Claude chatbot. In the end, though, that’s not as much as it sounds.

“A lot of travel, a lot of discussion about what to do and how to proceed and a lot of jobs passed up,” Graeber told NPR. “I’m much poorer for this settlement, ironically.”

A win or a loss?

While the AI company agreed to pay a near-record amount, the case was hardly a win for authors.

The court ruled that Anthropic did not violate copyright law simply by training its AI models on copyrighted books. Instead, the company was held liable for using unauthorized copies of those works.

AI companies, including Anthropic, have argued that the fair use doctrine allows them to use copyrighted material without permission in certain circumstances. Authors have countered that fair use doesn’t apply because AI systems are trained on their work to generate new writing that could compete with the originals.

A machine that can produce a book in minutes or hours has an inherent advantage over human authors, they argue. Graeber, for example, spent a decade researching and writing The Good Nurse, which Netflix has since adapted into a film.