Anthropic’s $1.5bn piracy deal gets final approval

A federal judge in San Francisco has given final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors who accused the company of training its Claude models on pirated books, closing what lawyers on both sides called the largest copyright recovery in US history.

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín signed off on the deal on 20 July, months after raising concerns about plaintiffs' lawyers' fees and other payout details. The settlement resolves Bartz v. Anthropic, a class action filed in 2024 by novelists Andrea Bartz and Charles Graeber and non-fiction writer Kirk Wallace Johnson, covering roughly half a million works. At about $3,000 per book, the payout is far above what has typically surfaced in other AI copyright disputes.

The case hinged on a split ruling. In June 2025, Judge William Alsup found that training a model on lawfully purchased books counted as fair use, a first-of-its-kind win for the industry. But he also ruled that Anthropic’s downloading of millions of titles from LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror was not lawful.

That left the company facing potential statutory damages that could have climbed into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Anthropic chose to settle in September 2025 instead of taking the piracy question to a jury. Because the outcome is a settlement rather than a verdict, it does not create binding precedent.

“We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court’s landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law, which remains the law today.”

Martínez-Olguín focused less on the fair-use finding than on whether the settlement fairly compensated authors.

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“The $1.5 billion settlement provides substantial benefits to the class in light of the novel claims asserted.” “Success at trial was not assured, and a loss would have left the class with no recourse.”

She also reduced the lawyers' request, cutting the attorneys' fee award by roughly $86 million, according to Law.com.

For rightsholders, the next step is payment. According to the Authors Guild, claimants whose books appeared on the works list drawn from LibGen and PiLiMi were asked to file claims earlier this year, with the standard trade split sending half of each payment to the publisher and half to the author, unless contracts say otherwise.

The size of the settlement now looms over similar lawsuits against Meta, Google, and OpenAI. Those cases have yet to produce Alsup’s distinction between lawful training and unlawful acquisition—and the next company to face a jury may not get such narrowly contained terms.