Judge Signs Off on Anthropic’s $1.5bn Book Piracy Settlement: The Largest in US Copyright History
A federal judge in San Francisco has signed off on Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors who accused the company of training its Claude models on pirated books, thus closing what lawyers on both sides describe as the largest copyright recovery in United States history.
The Deal and Its Impact
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted final approval on July 20, months after she initially balked at the deal and pressed plaintiffs’ lawyers for a clearer account of their fees. The money resolves Bartz v. Anthropic, a class action brought in 2024 by novelists Andrea Bartz and Charles Graeber and non-fiction writer Kirk Wallace Johnson, on behalf of roughly half a million works.
At approximately $3,000 per book, the payout surpasses the standard rate in most AI copyright disputes and comes while comparable cases against Meta, Google, and OpenAI are still ongoing.
The Ruling and Its Implications
The case turned on an unusual split: In a June 2025 ruling, Judge William Alsup found that training a model on lawfully purchased books was fair use—a first-of-its-kind win for the industry. However, he also ruled that Anthropic’s decision to download millions of titles from shadow libraries LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror constituted piracy.
Anthropic agreed to settle in September 2025 to avoid putting the piracy question to a jury. Since this is a settlement and not a verdict, it does not set a binding precedent, which was a key consideration for the company.
"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," said Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic’s deputy general counsel.
Judge Martínez-Olguín’s Decision
Martínez-Olguín, who took over the approval stage from Alsup, focused less on the fair-use aspect and more on whether the deal was fair to the authors. She wrote:
"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 trimmed the lawyers’ request for fees, cutting their award by roughly $86 million from what class counsel had sought.
The plaintiffs’ complaint described Anthropic’s actions as an attempt to "steal the fire of Prometheus" by "strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works."