On July 20, 2026, Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin of the US District Court for the Northern District of California entered final approval of the class action settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic (Case No. 3:24-cv-05417-AMO), the copyright suit brought by book authors over Anthropic’s downloading of pirated books to build its research library. The order finds the non-reversionary $1.5 billion settlement fund “fair, reasonable, and adequate” under Rule 23 and enters judgment, closing out the largest known copyright class settlement in US history.
The court’s order notes an overwhelmingly favorable class response, with a claims rate of at least 91.3 percent of covered works and an estimated per-work payment of approximately $3,000 - about four times the statutory minimum damages for willful infringement, before costs and fees. Beyond the money, the settlement requires Anthropic to destroy all original files of works torrented or downloaded from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, along with any copies originating from them, subject to legal preservation obligations.
The court did trim what the lawyers and named plaintiffs take home. Class counsel had asked for 12.5 percent of the fund - $187,500,000 - in fees; the court instead awarded $101,561,111, applying a 3.75 lodestar multiplier, plus reimbursement of about $2.98 million in litigation expenses and a cost reserve of $18.22 million for claims administration.
The case is the one that produced Judge Alsup’s June 2025 ruling that training on lawfully acquired books is fair use while retaining pirated library copies is not. With final approval now entered, that trade - AI training on legitimate copies can be defensible, but pirated acquisition carries a billion-dollar price tag - becomes the settled benchmark against which the 100-plus other pending AI copyright cases will be negotiated.