Court approves Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement over pirated books
Anthropic downloaded millions of pirated books into a central library. Authors will get about $3,000 per work in the largest known US copyright settlement.
A federal judge in San Francisco gave final approval on July 20 to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors whose books it took from the pirate libraries Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Reuters called it the largest known copyright settlement in US history.
The deal pays about $3,000 per work for roughly 465,000 to 500,000 books, plus $3,000 for each work beyond 500,000. Anthropic must destroy the pirated copies. More than 91% of covered authors and publishers have filed claims, Reuters reported, citing Anthropic.
How it got here
In June 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled that training Claude on books was fair use. He let the piracy claims go forward, finding that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million pirated books into a central library. That set up a trial over the downloads, not the training, and Anthropic settled before it began.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, who took the case after Alsup retired, granted final approval. She cut the lawyers’ fees to about $101.6 million from the $187.5 million requested, and noted that the per-work recovery is four times the $750 statutory minimum.
What it doesn’t cover
The settlement releases only past claims about the books Anthropic took in, through August 25, 2025. It does not cover claims about what Anthropic’s models output, or anything the company does from here.
What the company says
Anthropic's deputy general counsel, Aparna Sridhar, said in 2025 that the court had found its approach to training "constitutes fair use" and that the settlement resolves "the plaintiffs' remaining legacy claims." Anthropic also told the court that the pirated datasets were not in the training data of its commercially released models.
Sources
- Judge approves Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement of copyright lawsuit, Reuters via Business Insurance, July 21, 2026
- Court grants final approval to Anthropic copyright settlement, Authors Guild
- Anthropic Agrees to Pay $1.5 Billion to Settle Copyright Lawsuit, Publishers Weekly, September 8, 2025
- Bartz v. Anthropic Settlement Receives Final Approval, Authors Alliance, July 21, 2026
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