Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5 billion in record U.S. copyright settlement
ctjlewis · x · 2026-07-22
Anthropic has agreed to a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic, the largest such settlement in U.S. history.
- The 2024 lawsuit by novelists and nonfiction authors focused on pirated books used to train Claude.
- Judge William Alsup’s June 2025 ruling split the issue: training on the books was transformative fair use, but acquiring and retaining pirated copies was not.
- Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted final approval on July 20.
- Authors are expected to receive about $3,000 per book—roughly 2% of the $150,000 statutory maximum, or about $72 billion across the nearly half a million books involved.
- Anthropic must also destroy the original pirated files and any copies derived from them.
Related event: Anthropic Settles Copyright Lawsuit for $1.5B(23 posts)→
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