Judge approves Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement in authors' copyright case

10:45 AM · July 27, 2026

Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval on July 20, 2026 to a $1.5 billion class action settlement resolving claims that Anthropic illegally acquired pirated books to train its Claude models. The settlement covers roughly 500,000 works, with individual rights holders, including named plaintiffs Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, receiving approximately $3,000 per work after legal fees, and only about 350 authors out of the class opted out to pursue independent litigation. The case grew out of an earlier, separate ruling by Judge William Alsup that training AI models on copyrighted text is fair use, but that Anthropic's method of obtaining many of the books, downloading them from pirate sites such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, was illegal regardless of how the resulting model was used. Because Anthropic chose to settle instead of appealing or going to trial, the case does not create binding precedent, leaving the core legal questions still open in similar copyright suits against Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Midjourney. Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said the company still stands by the fair use ruling, which “remains the law today,” framing the settlement as resolving the piracy allegations specifically rather than conceding on how AI training itself is treated under copyright law. The size of the payout, the largest in the history of U.S. copyright law, is likely to shape how publishers and AI companies negotiate licensing deals going forward, even without a binding court precedent to point to.