Judge signs off on Anthropic’s $1.5 billion book case deal

A federal judge in San Francisco has given final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with a class of authors who said the company illegally downloaded their copyrighted books. The court called it the largest copyright class action settlement in history.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín signed the order on July 20, resolving claims brought by lead plaintiffs Andrea Bartz, Kirk Wallace Johnson, and others. The case focused on how Anthropic obtained the books—specifically through the pirated libraries LibGen and PiLiMi—rather than on whether using copyrighted material to train models is legal.

That distinction matters because, in an earlier ruling cited in the order, the court had already found that training itself was fair use.

Under the settlement, authors and publishers whose pirated books appeared on Anthropic’s “Works List” can claim about $3,000 per book, roughly four times the usual minimum in copyright infringement cases. According to the order, more than 91 percent of eligible works—over 440,000 books—have already been claimed. Anthropic must also delete the pirated files it downloaded.

The deal is limited. It releases Anthropic only from liability tied to its past acquisition of training data. It does not block future lawsuits over alleged harm, new claims, or claims “based on the output of AI models,” as Judge Martínez-Olguín explicitly wrote.

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The court also rejected all 54 objections and comments filed by class members and third parties. Those included requests to expand the list of covered works, require remedies such as source attribution, or even force deletion of Anthropic’s models. The judge said those demands were beyond the scope of this case.

The case is now officially closed, though the court will continue to oversee how the settlement money is distributed to authors.