A federal judge in San Francisco has given final approval to the $1.5 billion deal between Anthropic and a group of authors who accused the company of training its Claude models on pirated books. Lawyers on both sides call it the largest copyright recovery in US history. Rightsholders can now start collecting.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín signed off on the settlement on Monday, months after she pushed back on the deal and asked the plaintiffs’ lawyers to explain their fees more clearly. The case, Bartz v. Anthropic, started in 2024 when novelists Andrea Bartz and Charles Graeber and non-fiction writer Kirk Wallace Johnson filed a class action covering roughly half a million works. The payout comes down to about $3,000 per book, far above the going rate in comparable AI copyright disputes. Reuters was first to report the approval.
A split ruling that cut both ways
The case hinged on a distinction drawn by Judge William Alsup, who has since retired. In June 2025 he ruled that training a model on lawfully purchased books counts as fair use, a first-of-its-kind win for the AI industry. But he found that Anthropic’s decision to download millions of titles from the shadow libraries Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror was illegal on its own terms.
That left the company facing statutory damages that could have run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Anthropic agreed to settle in September 2025 rather than let a jury decide the piracy question.
“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.
No precedent for the rest of the industry
Because the case ended in a settlement rather than a verdict, it sets no binding precedent. Alsup’s ruling was a single district court decision, and Anthropic’s choice to settle means it will never reach an appeals court. Other judges remain free to reach their own conclusions.
That matters, because similar lawsuits against Google, Meta, Midjourney and OpenAI are still working their way through the courts. Last week a group of publishers and authors, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier and author Scott Turow, filed a class action against Google over its use of copyrighted works to train Gemini.
Martínez-Olguín defended the deal in her order. “The $1.5 billion settlement provides substantial benefits to the class in light of the novel claims asserted,” she wrote, adding that “success at trial was not assured, and a loss would have left the class with no recourse.” She did trim the lawyers’ fee award by roughly $86 million, according to Law.com.