A federal judge in San Francisco has signed off on Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors who accused the company of training its Claude models on pirated books, closing what lawyers on both sides describe as the largest copyright recovery in United States history.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted final approval on 20 July, months after she balked at the deal and pressed the plaintiffs’ lawyers for a clearer account of their fees.
The money resolves Bartz v. Anthropic, a class action brought in 2024 by the novelists Andrea Bartz and Charles Graeber and the non-fiction writer Kirk Wallace Johnson, on behalf of roughly half a million works.
At about $3,000 per book the payout dwarfs the going rate in most AI copyright disputes, and it lands while comparable cases against Meta, Google, and OpenAI grind on.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!The case turned on an unusual split. In a June 2025 ruling, Judge William Alsup found that training a model on lawfully purchased books was fair use, a first-of-its-kind win for the industry, but that Anthropic’s decision to download millions of titles from the shadow libraries LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror was not.
