Authors get $1.5 billion in settlement with Anthropic over pirated books

A US court has given final approval to the settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic. The ruling came on July 20, 2026, and was issued by Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the US District Court for the Northern District of California. Anthropic is the company behind the AI assistant Claude.

The settlement has a total value of $1.5 billion. It covers books that Anthropic obtained from the two pirate sites Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The settlement was reached in September 2025, and Anthropic entered into it without admitting liability.

Money for the authors who have filed claims

The official works list contains 482,460 works. About 92.77 percent of them have been claimed. The deadline for filing claims was March 30, 2026.

The estimated gross payout is roughly $3,100 per work for which a claim has been filed. The amount is distributed proportionally under an approved plan of allocation. It is an average, and the actual amount may differ, partly because the money must be split between authors and publishers.

The court also reduced the attorneys' fees from the requested $187.5 million to about $101.6 million. That corresponds to roughly 6.8 percent of the fund. Ten percent of the fee is being withheld until the payout has been finalized.

When will the money arrive?

No confirmed payout date has been set. The payout may be made in up to three installments, and as of September 8, 2026, the date was still unresolved. A special master, Theodore K. Cheng, will decide disputes over claims. Money that is not claimed is to be redistributed to class members if it is economically feasible.

About 350 class members opted out of the settlement, and 53 filed objections.

What the settlement covers, and what it doesn't

Anthropic must destroy all original files from the two pirate sites and all copies derived from them.

The settlement covers only Anthropic's past acquisition of pirated books up to August 25, 2025. Claims over what the AI models' outputs contain, and claims over future conduct, are not covered.

The background

In June 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled that training on copyrighted works could constitute fair use. That means the use can in some cases be lawful without permission. He found, however, that Anthropic was liable for having stored millions of pirated books in a central library.