A federal judge in San Francisco wanted more detail on lawyers’ fees and lead-plaintiff payments before signing off on what would be the largest copyright settlement in US history.
A federal judge in San Francisco declined on Thursday to give final approval to Anthropic’s proposed $1.5bn settlement with authors who say the company trained its Claude models on pirated books, asking lawyers for more detail on counsel fees and payments to the three lead plaintiffs before she would sign off.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, who inherited the case from Judge William Alsup after a reassignment earlier this year, presided over the fairness hearing in Bartz v. Anthropic.
The class is led by thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, and the deal would resolve a suit alleging Anthropic downloaded more than seven million books from the shadow libraries LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror to train its models.
On the headline arithmetic, the settlement covers roughly 480,000 works and pays out around $3,000 per work after fees, the largest known sum in a US copyright case.
