2025 Class Action Lawsuits: Amazon, Anthropic, and Opioid Settlements

Class action settlements in the United States reached a record $79 billion in 2025, nearly doubling the $42 billion paid out the year before and surpassing the previous high of $66 billion set in 2022.¹ The 2025 class action settlements were driven by massive antitrust recoveries, the FTC’s $2.5 billion deal with Amazon over Prime subscriptions, a landmark $1.5 billion AI copyright settlement with Anthropic, the finalization of Purdue Pharma’s $7.4 billion opioid plan, and a surge in consumer protection and privacy filings.²

The Year in Numbers

A total of 1,761 class actions settled in 2025, with payouts topping $79 billion. Settlement values have now exceeded $40 billion for four straight years. Federal courts saw more than 13,000 class action filings during the year, roughly 36 new cases per day, and judges granted class certification in 68% of motions.³

Antitrust was the largest settlement category by far, accounting for $45.99 billion. Products liability followed at $17.9 billion, then securities fraud at $3.45 billion, government enforcement at $3.29 billion, consumer fraud at $2.1 billion, and generative AI and cryptocurrency cases at $1.59 billion.¹ Consumer protection cases drove new filings, exceeding 7,600 federal complaints — nearly 50% above the prior year.²

The $2.5 Billion Amazon Prime Settlement

The most prominent single enforcement action of the year was the Federal Trade Commission’s $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon over its Prime subscription practices. Announced on September 25, 2025, the deal included a $1 billion civil penalty, the largest ever for a violation of FTC rules, plus $1.5 billion set aside for consumer refunds covering roughly 35 million affected customers.⁴

The FTC alleged Amazon used confusing interfaces to enroll consumers in Prime without clear consent and then made cancellation unnecessarily difficult. Internal company communications referenced by the agency described the practices as a “shady world” and “an unspoken cancer.” The settlement requires Amazon to provide a clear button for customers to decline Prime and to make cancellation as easy as enrollment, with an independent third party overseeing redress.⁴

Amazon began distributing automatic refunds in November and December 2025 and, in January 2026, started sending claim notices to eligible customers who did not receive automatic payments. The maximum refund per customer is $51, payable by check, PayPal, or Venmo.⁵

Antitrust: Drug Pricing and a New Fertilizer Front

Antitrust litigation dominated the dollar totals. In pharmaceuticals, the long-running generic drug price-fixing multidistrict litigation kept producing recoveries. Sun Pharmaceutical Industries and Taro Pharmaceutical reached a $200 million settlement with end purchasers.⁶ Sandoz separately agreed to a $275 million deal with end payors, and the narcolepsy drug Xyrem produced a $198.4 million settlement for self-insured health plans. Other notable pharmaceutical settlements included $73.5 million from Mylan over EpiPen pricing and $51.4 million from AstraZeneca over Seroquel XR.⁷

Fertilizer emerged as a significant new antitrust front. In early 2026, class actions were filed alleging that Mosaic, Nutrien, CF Industries, Koch, and Yara conspired to fix prices for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium fertilizers. The lawsuits claim these companies control over 80% of the U.S. nitrogen market and over 90% of the phosphate and potash markets.⁸ The Department of Justice has opened a formal investigation, and USDA officials publicly accused the companies of constraining supply. Fertilizer prices rose more than 60% during 2021–2022, adding an estimated $128,000 in costs per farm in 2022.⁹

Purdue Pharma and the Ongoing Opioid Recovery

Opioid-related settlements drove much of the products liability total. On November 18, 2025, Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy plan was finalized at more than $7.4 billion. Over 99% of voting creditors supported the plan, which ends the Sackler family’s control of the company and bars them from selling opioids in the United States. The first payment, expected in early 2026, includes $1.5 billion from the Sacklers and roughly $900 million from Purdue, with additional payments totaling $1.4 billion over three subsequent years.¹⁰

Other opioid settlements kept accumulating. A combined deal by AmerisourceBergen (now Cencora), Cardinal Health, McKesson, Johnson & Johnson, Teva, and Allergan provided $651 million in direct compensation to over 1,000 hospitals and providers, plus $49 million in naloxone. Amneal Pharmaceuticals agreed to pay $88.5 million. The Fourth Circuit also revived a $2.5 billion lawsuit against distributors in West Virginia by reversing a 2022 ruling.¹¹

The $1.5 Billion Anthropic Deal and the AI Copyright Wave

Generative AI became a major new litigation category. The landmark settlement came in Bartz v. Anthropic, where Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve a class action alleging it trained its AI models on pirated books. The settlement covers an estimated 500,000 works at roughly $3,000 per book.¹² A federal judge had ruled that while training AI on legally obtained books qualified as fair use, training on pirated copies from sources like LibGen did not. The court granted preliminary approval, and the class has been certified.¹³

AI copyright litigation keeps expanding. A consolidated multidistrict litigation against OpenAI is in active discovery. Google faces a class certification motion in In re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation. A federal judge granted summary judgment to Meta in a case brought by authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sarah Silverman, effectively ending those claims.¹² New suits were filed against Apple, Salesforce, Cerebras Systems, Adobe, and others in late 2025.¹³

Privacy, Biometrics, and Data Breach

Privacy class actions surged 25% in 2025, totaling more than 1,800 cases, with new suits targeting session replay technology, website chatbots, and tracking pixels.³

Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act litigation moved the other way. Legislative reforms enacted in 2024 capped per-scan damages at $1,000 to $5,000 per victim, and new BIPA filings dropped to 150 from 427 the prior year. Total BIPA settlements fell 34% to $136.6 million.¹⁴ The most unusual BIPA deal involved Clearview AI. A federal judge approved a $51.75 million settlement, but instead of cash the class received a 23% equity stake in the company, with payout contingent on a future IPO, sale, or other liquidation event. Attorneys general from 22 states objected to the structure, citing uncertainty over the equity’s actual value.¹⁵ Other BIPA settlements included $47.5 million from Motorola Solutions and $18.2 million from Pearson Testing.¹⁶

Several large data breach settlements moved through the courts. Comcast agreed to a $117.5 million deal over a breach discovered in October 2023 that potentially compromised personal information of customers who received notification letters.¹⁷ Oracle settled its data privacy class action for $115 million, with the Ninth Circuit affirming the deal in February 2026; beyond cash, Oracle agreed to stop capturing user-generated information from referrer URLs and web forms.¹⁸ Google and YouTube settled a children’s privacy class action for $30 million over allegations of collecting data from users under 13 without parental consent.⁶

A newer category of privacy litigation involves the Video Privacy Protection Act. The New England Patriots agreed to a $2.16 million settlement after a lawsuit alleged the team’s app collected and shared data about which videos users watched, along with geolocation information, without consent. Roughly 105,000 consumers were eligible.¹⁹ A federal court in California also allowed a class action against Google to proceed over allegations that its Cloud Contact Center AI eavesdropped on customer conversations in violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act.²⁰

Social Media Youth Harm Reaches Trial

Lawsuits alleging that social media platforms are designed to be addictive and harmful to children reached a critical stage. More than 1,200 school districts have sued Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snap, arguing that features like infinite scroll and recommendation algorithms disrupted learning and forced schools to spend heavily on mental health services.²¹

The first bellwether personal injury trial began in Los Angeles in January 2026. TikTok and Snap settled with the plaintiff on the eve of trial for undisclosed amounts, and the jury then found Meta and Google liable for harming the plaintiff.²² In May 2026, the first federal school district test case produced a collective $27 million settlement from Meta, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube.²³ Bloomberg Intelligence has estimated collective theoretical liability of almost $400 billion across the pending school district cases.²¹

Securities, Employment, and Toxic Torts

Securities class action settlements totaled $2.9 billion across 79 resolved cases. The case count was down from 94 in 2024, but the median settlement value hit $17 million, the highest since 2016. The ten largest ranged from $80 million to $433.5 million and together accounted for $1.7 billion.²⁴ Two cracked the all-time Top 100 list: Alibaba Group Holdings at $433.5 million and General Electric at $362.5 million.²⁵ Wells Fargo settled for $85 million over alleged false statements about a diversity hiring initiative.²⁶

On the employment side, the largest class action settlement of the year was McCutcheon v. Colgate-Palmolive, which resolved for $332 million in June 2025. The case alleged that Colgate-Palmolive improperly calculated lump-sum pension payments for retirees in violation of ERISA, and covers approximately 1,200 retirees and surviving spouses who elected lump-sum payouts between 1989 and 2005.⁶ The Fair Credit Reporting Act produced a $23 million settlement in Norman v. Trans Union, resolving allegations that the credit bureau failed to investigate hard inquiry disputes. About 485,000 consumers were eligible for automatic payments of $20 to $30, with those who suffered additional harm able to claim up to $160. Final approval came on July 22, 2025.²⁷

Litigation over per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly called “forever chemicals,” accelerated. The Aqueous Film Forming Foam multidistrict litigation in South Carolina contains over 10,000 cases, with the first bellwether personal injury trials scheduled for October 2025. Claims have expanded beyond water contamination into wearable technology, food packaging, and pharmaceutical bandages, and attorneys general in 30 states and the District of Columbia have initiated PFAS litigation against manufacturers. Major PFAS deals already on the books include 3M’s $10.3 billion settlement with public water systems and a separate $450 million settlement with New Jersey announced in May 2025, along with DuPont’s nearly $1.2 billion 2023 water system deal.²⁸ The Supreme Court is weighing whether federal law preempts state-level lawsuits over pesticides, a decision that could affect thousands of pending cases and potentially extend to microplastics claims.²⁹

Consumer fraud settlements totaled $2.1 billion, with “greenwashing” cases growing. Keurig’s $10 million deal over claims that its K-Cup pods were labeled “recyclable” despite being unprocessable by most recycling facilities became a frequently cited example.³⁰ Sutter Health separately agreed to a $228.5 million settlement resolving allegations that anti-competitive practices led to higher insurance premiums for Northern California consumers.⁷

An Unresolved Supreme Court Question

The most closely watched procedural question of the year was whether federal courts can certify a class that includes members who have not suffered a concrete injury. The Supreme Court took up the issue in Laboratory Corporation of America v. Davis, but on June 5, 2025, dismissed the case as improvidently granted after concluding that conflicting class definitions in the lower courts prevented it from reaching the merits.³¹

Justice Brett Kavanaugh dissented, arguing that classes “overinflated with uninjured members” can force companies into costly settlements through sheer litigation pressure.³¹ A circuit split persists. Most federal appeals courts treat uninjured class members as a factor in the predominance analysis rather than an automatic bar to certification, while the Eighth Circuit requires that every member of a damages class have standing.³² The question will almost certainly return to the Court.

Where This Is Heading

AI training data litigation is proliferating, with consolidated actions against OpenAI, Google, and others still in early stages. Social media youth harm cases carry theoretical exposure in the hundreds of billions. PFAS contamination lawsuits are multiplying as testing reveals the chemicals in new products and water sources. Fertilizer antitrust litigation, backed by an active DOJ investigation, is just beginning. With filings at decade highs and certification rates still favorable to plaintiffs, the $79 billion figure for 2025 may prove to be a stepping stone rather than a ceiling.³³

1
Forbes. Class Action Lawsuit Settlements Set Another Record in 2025
2
LexisNexis. Lex Machina Class Action Litigation Report: Filings Surge to Highest Level in a Decade
3
Insurance Journal. Class Action Settlements Exceeded $70 Billion in 2025
4
Federal Trade Commission. FTC Secures Historic $2.5 Billion Settlement Against Amazon
5
Federal Trade Commission. Amazon Refunds
6
Expert Institute. Latest Class Action Payouts
7
MCAG Inc. Class Action Settlements: Key B2B Antitrust Trends and Industry Updates From the First Half of 2025
8
ClassAction.org. Antitrust Lawsuit Accuses Major Fertilizer Manufacturers of Illegal Price-Fixing Scheme
9
AgProud. Class Action Lawsuit Alleges Price-Fixing in the US Fertilizer Industry
10
NY Attorney General. Attorney General James Announces Every State Has Joined $7.4 Billion Settlement
11
Opioid Settlement Tracker. Global Settlement Tracker
12
NPR. Anthropic Settlement Authors Copyright AI
13
Authors Alliance. AI Class Action Litigation Update: Books, Where Things Stand in Early 2026
14
Legal Newsline. Reforms Sliced BIPA Class Actions in 2025, New Report Says
15
Regulatory Oversight. $51.75M Settlement in Clearview AI Biometric Privacy Litigation
16
Claim Depot. BIPA Settlements
17
Comcast Breach Settlement. Hasson v. Comcast Cable Communications
18
Katz Privacy Settlement. Katz-Lacabe v. Oracle America
19
ClassAction.org. $2.16M Patriots Settlement Resolves Class Action Over Alleged App Data Collection
20
Holland & Knight. Up Next in Privacy Litigation: Class Actions Begin to Target AI Call Center Tools
21
EdSource. Social Media Giants Settle One of More Than a Thousand Addiction Lawsuits
22
NPR. Social Media Kids Addiction Mental Health Trial
23
Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. States File Lawsuits Against Social Media Companies Over Youth Mental Health
24
Cooley SLE. Securities Class Action Trends in 2025: Fewer Cases Filed but More Dollars at Stake
25
D&O Diary. ISS Releases Top 100 Securities Suit Settlements List
26
FRT Services. Securities Class Action Settlements Disbursements Q4 2025
27
TransUnion Dispute Class Action. Duane E. Norman, Sr. v. Trans Union, LLC
28
Steptoe. PFAS Lawsuits on the Rise: Trends, Risks and Takeaways
29
Environmental Law Institute. Current Trends in Toxics Litigation
30
Resource Recycling. Keurig Agrees to $10 Million Settlement, Recycling Disclaimer
31
SCOTUSblog. Justices Dismiss Dispute Over Class Certification Standards
32
Congress.gov. Supreme Court Considers Class Certification and Article III Standing
33
Corporate Counsel. Corporate Class Action Settlements in 2025 Blew Past Prior Record