Judge approves $1.5 billion settlement by Anthropic over pirated books

A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and a class of authors and publishers, resolving claims that the AI company used pirated books to train its chatbot Claude. The agreement, ratified on July 20, 2026, by U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in San Francisco, is the largest known copyright recovery in history. Source: Clarin

Legal backdrop

The case began in 2024 when authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued Anthropic for downloading pirated books from sites like Library Genesis and Books3. In a prior 2025 ruling, Judge William Alsup held that training AI on legally acquired books qualifies as fair use, but that storing millions of pirated copies in a central library did not. That finding exposed Anthropic to potential statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work. Source: Euronews

Key details

• Around 500,000 works are covered, with each entitled to roughly $3,000. Over 91% of eligible rights holders have already filed claims. Source: Infobae
• The settlement avoids a trial that could have cost Anthropic hundreds of billions of dollars. Source: La Vanguardia
• Anthropic's deputy general counsel, Aparna Sridhar, welcomed the resolution, while lead plaintiffs' attorney Justin Nelson called it "the largest copyright recovery in history." Source: Euronews