A federal judge in San Francisco approved a $1.5 billion settlement in a copyright lawsuit involving the AI company Anthropic and a group of authors.
The settlement is considered the largest known copyright settlement in U.S. history. It stems from a lawsuit filed in August 2024 by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of using pirated books to train its AI model, Claude.
Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin rejected arguments that the settlement amount was insufficient. The settlement will provide approximately $3,000 per work for around 500,000 works involved in the case. More than 91% of authors and publishers eligible for the settlement have applied to receive their payments.
The settlement was reached after a ruling by Judge William Alsup in June 2025, which stated that while using legally obtained books for training could be considered fair use, storing millions of pirated books in a “central library” was not.
Potential damages for Anthropic could have reached hundreds of billions of dollars if the case had gone to trial. Judge Martinez-Olguin approved over $101 million in attorney fees, rejecting a request for $187.5 million.
Some authors have objected to the settlement, claiming it is not comprehensive enough and that some rights holders were unfairly excluded. Judge Martinez-Olguin dismissed these objections in her ruling.
The settlement was finalized on July 20, 2026.
