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Court gives final approval to Anthropic's $1.5bn settlement with book authors

Enforcement or rulingInformationFrontierUSReported

A federal judge in the Northern District of California approved the class settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic over books downloaded from pirate libraries, paying about $3,000 per work. Fees were cut to about 6.8% ($101.56m), the release covers only past conduct up to 25 August 2025 and not output claims, and Anthropic must destroy the files taken from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.

Why it matters

The largest copyright recovery on record puts a concrete price on training with pirated data, even where training itself may be fair use.

SourceAuthors GuildCoverage: JURISTCoverage: Bloomberg Law Based on credible reporting; we could not open the primary document. Independently fact-checked on 7 Oct 2026.
AnthropicAuthors Guild

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