Bloomsbury among publishers in line for payout from Anthropic’s $1.5bn copyright settlement
The London house says 14,087 of its titles are covered by the largest copyright settlement in US history, with roughly $3,000 owed per work.
July 22, 2026 – 8:41 am
Bloomsbury, the London publisher best known for the Harry Potter series, has confirmed it will collect a share of Anthropic’s $1.5bn settlement with authors, the largest copyright payout in US history.
The company told the stock market this week that 14,087 of its titles sit on the list of works covered by the deal, which a federal judge signed off on Monday. The money stems from Bartz v. Anthropic, the class action a group of writers brought after the AI firm was found to have downloaded millions of pirated books to train its Claude models.
The case had already produced a rare fairness hearing before Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted final approval, inheriting the matter from Judge William Alsup, who has since retired.
The settlement resolves one of the first real reckonings over how generative AI systems are built.
Under the terms, each eligible work draws compensation of about $3,000, before deductions for legal fees and court costs. Bloomsbury said the amount attached to each of its titles would be divided equally between author and publisher, leaving each side with around $1,500 per book. The company expects the cash to arrive in instalments beginning in the second half of its financial year, according to its regulatory filing.
Anthropic had bought and scanned physical books legally, but it also pulled roughly seven million copies from pirate repositories, Library Genesis in 2021 and the Pirate Library Mirror in 2022, a practice the court treated separately from the question of AI training itself. After duplicates and ineligible works were stripped out, about 500,000 distinct titles qualified for the class, each needing a US copyright registration to count.
That distinction did most of the work. In June 2025, Alsup ruled that training models on copyrighted text could count as fair use, while acquiring pirated copies could not. Anthropic chose to settle rather than appeal, which leaves the fair-use finding as a single district-court opinion rather than binding precedent.
Anthropic did not admit wrongdoing in agreeing to pay. The arithmetic still favoured a settlement, since statutory damages can reach $150,000 per infringed work, an exposure that, spread across a class this size, dwarfed the $1.5bn on the table and made a jury trial the larger gamble. Authors and publishers had until the end of March to lodge claims against the approved list of works.