Anthropic’s $1.5B Copyright Deal: Payouts, Claims, and Approval

The Anthropic copyright settlement is a $1.5 billion class action deal in which the AI company agreed to compensate authors whose books it downloaded from pirate libraries to train its Claude models. Eligible copyright holders receive roughly $3,000 per work, claims must be submitted by March 30, 2026, and initial payments are estimated for August 2026 if the court grants final approval.¹²

The case is Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in August 2024 by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson.³ It is widely described as the largest publicly reported payout in the history of U.S. copyright litigation.

Why Anthropic Is Paying

Court records showed Anthropic downloaded roughly seven million books from two “shadow libraries,” Library Genesis (LibGen) in June 2021 and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) in July 2022, and used them to build a training corpus.⁴

On June 23, 2025, Judge William Alsup issued a split summary judgment. He held that training AI on copyrighted books was “spectacularly transformative” and qualified as fair use. But he ruled separately that Anthropic had “no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library” and that building a permanent library from pirated files was “inherently, irredeemably infringing,” even when the later use was transformative.⁵ Later purchases of the same books, the court held, could not cure the piracy.⁶

That ruling put Anthropic on the hook for piracy across nearly 500,000 works, with statutory damages reaching up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. Facing potential liability in the tens of billions and a December 2025 trial date, the parties announced a settlement on August 26, 2025.⁷

Who Qualifies as a Class Member

The class covers legal or beneficial copyright owners of works Anthropic downloaded from LibGen or PiLiMi that appear on the official Works List. To be eligible, a title must meet all of the following:

Have an ISBN or ASIN.
Have been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office within five years of publication.
Have that registration on file either before Anthropic’s download dates (June 2021 for LibGen, July 2022 for PiLiMi) or within three months of publication.⁴

The class is not limited to U.S. citizens. International authors and publishers whose registered works appear in the pirated datasets are included.⁷

Who Gets the Money: Author or Publisher

For trade and university press titles, the default payment split is 50/50 between author and publisher. Self-published authors and those whose rights have reverted receive the full amount. Educational works have no standard default split; claimants must make a good-faith representation based on their contracts. Disputes over splits go to a court-appointed special master.²

How Much You Get and When

The settlement fund is $1.5 billion, non-reversionary, paid by Anthropic in four installments: $300 million on October 2, 2025; $300 million within days of final approval; $450 million by September 2026; and $450 million by September 2027, with interest accruing on the later payments.⁸

Each eligible work receives approximately $3,000 before deductions for attorneys’ fees and administrative expenses, divided equally among all works with valid claims. If the final list exceeds 500,000 works, Anthropic pays an additional $3,000 for each added title.⁹

Initial distributions to claimants are estimated for August 2026, contingent on final court approval. Payments to class members may be issued in up to three installments, tracking Anthropic’s own payment schedule to the fund.²

The settlement also requires Anthropic to destroy all copies of works it downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi.⁹

How to File a Claim

JND Legal Administration is the claims administrator. Authors and publishers can check whether their works appear on the Works List using the lookup tool at anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com, and can file claims online, by email, or by mail.¹⁰

The claim deadline is March 30, 2026.¹ At the May 2026 fairness hearing, lead counsel reported a claims rate of 92.77%, with 447,576 works claimed from the eligible list.¹¹

What the Settlement Does Not Cover

The release is narrower than the dollar figure suggests. It covers only past conduct through August 25, 2025. It does not grant Anthropic any license for future AI training, and it does not release claims related to the output of Claude or any other AI model. Anthropic separately certified that it did not use LibGen or PiLiMi materials in any commercial models.⁹

Books that don’t meet the registration and ISBN/ASIN rules fall outside the class, even if they appear in the pirated datasets. That gap has become a real issue for authors whose publishers never registered their copyrights. Macmillan publicly acknowledged the problem and committed to making affected authors “whole by paying you what you otherwise would have been paid under the settlement.”¹² The Authors Guild said it hoped other publishers would follow.⁴

One objector at the fairness hearing noted a related quirk: a single copyright registration covering more than 40 novels was being counted as one claimable work, not 40.¹³

Where Final Approval Stands

The settlement did not sail through. When the parties first sought preliminary approval in September 2025, Judge Alsup postponed it, saying the deal was “nowhere close to complete” and voicing concern that class members “get the shaft” once monetary relief is set.¹⁴ He ordered the parties to produce a definitive list of covered works and a stronger notice and claims process.¹⁵ After the parties reworked the agreement, he granted preliminary approval on September 25, 2025.⁹

The case was reassigned to Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín after Judge Alsup’s retirement at the end of 2025. She held the fairness hearing on May 14, 2026. The settlement drew 53 formal objections, though counsel said roughly half were from people asking to be added to the settlement rather than opposing it.¹³ Substantive objections included:

That the $3,000 per work figure is only about two percent of the $150,000 statutory ceiling and does not meet the “fair, reasonable, and adequate” standard.
That the U.S. registration requirement excludes foreign works in a way one objector argued violates the Berne Convention.
That authors whose publishers failed to register are shut out through no fault of their own.
That a one-time payment is inadequate because Anthropic continues to profit from models trained on the pirated files.¹³

Judge Martínez-Olguín did not rule from the bench. She ordered Anthropic to file a supplemental brief by May 21, 2026, addressing whether five late opt-out requests should be honored.¹¹ Anthropic filed that brief urging denial of the untimely opt-outs.¹⁶ As of June 2026, the settlement is awaiting final approval, and observers generally expect it to be granted given the high claims rate and limited substantive opposition.

1
Authors Guild. Anthropic Claim Guide
2
Anthropic Copyright Settlement. Settlement FAQ
3
ClassAction.org. Bartz et al. v. Anthropic PBC Complaint
4
Authors Guild. What Authors Need to Know About the Anthropic Settlement
5
Copyright Alliance. Bartz v. Anthropic Order
6
AFS Law. Landmark Ruling: AI Copyright Fair Use vs. Infringement in Bartz v. Anthropic
7
Wolters Kluwer. The Bartz v. Anthropic Settlement: Understanding America’s Largest Copyright Settlement
8
ClassAction.org. Bartz v. Anthropic PBC Settlement Notice
9
Susman Godfrey. Susman Godfrey Secures $1.5 Billion Settlement in Landmark AI Piracy Case
10
Anthropic Copyright Settlement. Claim Form
11
Publishers Weekly. Little Drama at Anthropic’s Settlement Hearing
12
Locus Magazine. AI Company Anthropic Settles for $1.5 Billion in Authors’ Lawsuit
13
Publishing Perspectives. Anthropic Settlement Appears to Cruise Through Its Final Fairness Hearing
14
Bloomberg Law. Anthropic Judge Blasts Copyright Pact as Nowhere Close to Done
15
AFS Law. Judge Pauses Anthropic’s $1.5 Billion Copyright Settlement
16
Clark Hill. Right to Know, June 2026