A federal judge grants final approval to Anthropic's 1.5 billion dollar copyright settlement

5:12 PM · July 21, 2026

A federal judge in San Francisco granted final approval to Anthropic's 1.5 billion dollar settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who accused the company of misusing their books to train its Claude chatbot, according to TechCrunch and Reuters. US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, who took over the case after now retired Judge William Alsup had granted preliminary approval last September, rejected objections from some authors who argued the settlement was too small, overcompensated the plaintiffs' attorneys, or wrongly excluded certain copyright owners, writing that the complaints were not grounded in a realistic assessment of the overall risks and rewards of taking the case to trial. The settlement, the largest known payout in US copyright case history, will deliver 3,000 dollars per work across an estimated 500,000 works, shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them, and the judge awarded plaintiffs' attorneys just over 101 million dollars of the 187.5 million dollars they had requested in fees. The ruling closes out one of the highest profile cases in the wave of copyright litigation against AI companies over training data, though it resolves only Anthropic's specific dispute with this group of authors rather than the broader legal question of whether training AI models on copyrighted books without permission qualifies as fair use, a question still being litigated against other AI companies in separate cases.