Class action lawsuits in 2025 reached unprecedented scale, with the ten largest settlements totaling $79 billion and more than 13,000 class actions filed in federal courts.1Duane Morris 2026 Class Action Review Antitrust cases drove most of the money, products liability and mass torts added nearly $18 billion, and new fronts opened in artificial intelligence, social media, and data privacy. Several of the year’s settlements remain open for consumer claims through 2026.
The Biggest Settlements of 2025
The year’s largest resolution was the $38 billion Visa and Mastercard swipe-fee settlement, which addressed antitrust claims merchants first filed in 2005. U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan in Brooklyn granted preliminary approval in June 2026. The deal would lower swipe fees by 0.1 percentage points for five years, cap standard consumer rates at 1.25% for eight years, and let merchants choose which card categories to accept. The National Retail Federation, the National Association of Convenience Stores, and Walmart have opposed it, saying it does not adequately address the cost of rewards cards.
Antitrust accounted for roughly $46 billion of the year’s total. Products liability and mass tort settlements added nearly $18 billion. Securities fraud contributed $3.45 billion, government enforcement actions $3.29 billion, consumer fraud $2.1 billion, and generative AI and cryptocurrency cases about $1.59 billion combined.
Other major 2025 resolutions included:
- Purdue Pharma: a $7.4 billion settlement in principle involving the Sackler family over opioid marketing, approved in January 2025 in New York bankruptcy court.
- Los Angeles County: a tentative $4 billion agreement covering more than 6,800 claims of sexual abuse in juvenile detention facilities and foster homes.
- College athlete NIL compensation: $2.78 billion, with final approval granted in June 2025 by Judge Claudia Wilken in the Northern District of California, allowing Division I schools to share revenue directly with athletes.
- Columbia University: a $750 million settlement over claims against a former obstetrician-gynecologist, approved in May 2025 in the Southern District of New York.
- CDK Global: a $630 million antitrust settlement with software vendors who alleged CDK restricted access to dealer management systems. A separate $100 million CDK settlement with auto dealers and a $29.5 million Reynolds and Reynolds settlement were also approved.
- Capital One 360 Savings: a $425 million settlement over allegations the bank deceptively advertised interest rates while offering higher rates on a separate 360 Performance Savings product.
- Perdue Farms: a $398 million antitrust settlement alleging a conspiracy to suppress poultry worker wages.
- Colgate-Palmolive: a $332 million settlement resolving ERISA claims by about 1,200 retirees over lump-sum pension payout calculations.
Open Settlements You Can Still Claim
Several 2025 settlements remain open for claims into 2026, and some pay automatically with no claim form required.
- Capital One 360 Savings, $425 million. The court granted final approval in April 2026. Payments are expected around July 2026 and are automatic for anyone who held a 360 Savings account between September 2019 and June 2025. No claim form is required.
- Flagstar Bank, $31.5 million. Covers two 2021 cyberattacks. Affected individuals can claim up to $25,000 for documented losses or an estimated $60 cash payment. Deadline: August 11, 2026.
- Lakeview Loan Servicing, $26 million. Current and former mortgage customers affected by a 2021 data breach. No documentation required. Deadline: June 22, 2026.
- GlaxoSmithKline Boostrix: $10 without proof of vaccination. Deadline: June 8, 2026.
- Differin benzene contamination: $9 to $27. Deadline: May 19, 2026.
- Panda Restaurant Group data breach: a $100 alternative cash payment, with California residents eligible for an additional statutory payment of up to $150. Deadline: April 10, 2026.
- Hyundai and Kia airbag control units: a $62.1 million settlement covering defective units in certain vehicles, with a claim deadline extending to March 2027.
Water utilities that detect PFAS contamination also face claim deadlines in the first half of 2026 under the 3M settlement of up to $12.5 billion and the DuPont settlement of $1.185 billion.
AI Enters the Class Action Docket
Generative AI became a major new front for class actions in 2025, with cases targeting both the data used to train models and the harms allegedly caused by their outputs.
The largest AI-related resolution was the $1.5 billion settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic, over claims that Anthropic trained its Claude chatbot on copyrighted books obtained from pirate repositories like Library Genesis. Judge William Alsup in the Northern District of California ruled in June 2025 that using books to train AI was “exceedingly transformative” and constituted fair use when the books were legally acquired, but that using pirated copies was not fair use. The settlement, preliminarily approved in September 2025 with a final approval hearing scheduled for May 2026, covers roughly 500,000 titles and would pay approximately $3,000 per book. Anthropic agreed to destroy the infringing datasets but did not admit liability.
Other AI cases moved in different directions. A federal judge granted Meta summary judgment in Coates and Silverman v. Meta in June 2025. Warner Bros. Discovery filed a new copyright suit against Midjourney over AI-generated film characters in September 2025. Major record labels continued pursuing lawsuits against AI music generators Suno and Udio. And in November 2025, seven lawsuits were filed against OpenAI alleging that ChatGPT’s GPT-4o model caused severe psychological harm, including suicidal ideation. The California Judicial Council granted coordination of those cases, along with additional actions bringing the total to twelve, in San Francisco in early 2026 under JCCP No. 5431.
AI-related claims also showed up in a different form in call-center litigation. After a federal court in the Northern District of California denied Google’s motion to dismiss in Ambriz v. Google LLC in February 2025, plaintiffs’ firms began filing similar suits against other developers of AI-powered call center analytics, alleging the technology amounts to illegal eavesdropping under the California Invasion of Privacy Act.
Social Media and Children
Juries began holding social media platforms liable for addictive design in 2025 and early 2026. In March 2026, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury found Meta and YouTube liable in a bellwether trial involving a plaintiff identified as KGM, ruling that platform features were deliberately designed to be addictive. TikTok and Snap settled before trial. A separate New Mexico jury found that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed information about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. These cases focused on product design and platform features rather than third-party content, navigating around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
The broader litigation covers thousands of families, school districts, and attorneys general from 42 states. Multidistrict litigation (MDL No. 3047) continues in the Northern District of California. Six school districts and five individual plaintiffs have been selected for bellwether trials expected to begin in 2026. Meta and Google have said they disagree with the verdicts and are exploring appeals.
Privacy and Data Breach Claims Keep Growing
Data privacy was the fastest-growing category of class action in 2025. Over 1,800 data privacy class actions were filed, a 25% increase over 2024 and a 200% increase since 2022. The growth was fueled by the proliferation of data breaches, expanding state privacy laws, and new theories targeting AI-powered surveillance tools.
Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act drew 427 lawsuits in 2024, and courts continued to test the boundaries of AI-related biometric claims. One court allowed claims about virtual try-on technology to proceed while another dismissed claims that PhotoDNA constituted facial recognition.
Open data breach settlements included $31.5 million from Flagstar Bank, $26 million from Lakeview Loan Servicing, and smaller resolutions involving healthcare providers like Illinois Bone and Joint Institute ($4 million), Cardiovascular Consultants ($3.85 million), and Bell Ambulance ($2 million).
PFAS, GLP-1 Drugs, and Other Mass Torts
PFAS “forever chemicals” litigation continued to expand off a landmark $10.3 billion settlement approved in March 2024 over aqueous film-forming foams used in firefighting. 3M agreed to pay up to $12.5 billion and DuPont agreed to $1.185 billion to support remediation for public water utilities that detect PFAS contamination. The litigation also branched into consumer products, with class actions targeting manufacturers over PFAS in items like cosmetics and carpet treatments. In Hoosick Falls, New York, a fourth defendant agreed to a $27 million settlement in July 2025, on top of $65.25 million previously paid by three other companies over PFAS water contamination discovered in 2016.
The regulatory picture remained uncertain. The EPA finalized the first national PFAS drinking water limits in April 2024, but the current administration announced it would stop defending regulations for four of the six chemicals covered and extend the compliance deadline for the remaining two to 2031.
The largest active pharmaceutical litigation involved GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro. By April 2026, more than 3,500 cases were consolidated in MDL 3094 in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, with plaintiffs alleging the drugs caused severe gastrointestinal injuries, including gastroparesis and intestinal blockages, without adequate warnings. A separate MDL (No. 3163) was created in December 2025 to handle vision loss claims. No settlements have been reached and no bellwether trials have occurred. In August 2025, the court ruled that plaintiffs pursuing gastroparesis claims must have a gastric emptying study in their medical records. Bellwether trials are estimated to begin in late 2026 or early 2027.
Other active drug litigation included a new MDL for Depo-Provera, the injectable contraceptive linked in a 2024 study to meningioma tumors, and continuing investigation into whether the eczema drug Dupixent increases the risk of a rare lymphoma.
What’s Driving the Numbers
Two forces explain much of the 2025 surge. First, class certification rates climbed above 68%, up from 63% in 2024, which legal observers described as a “snowball effect” that pushed defendants toward larger settlements as the odds of class-wide litigation grew.1Duane Morris 2026 Class Action Review Second, the Duane Morris review attributed a rise in private employment-related class actions partly to a perceived decrease in federal anti-discrimination enforcement under the Trump administration, which shifted the enforcement burden toward private plaintiffs. Wage-and-hour settlements, particularly in California, continued at a steady clip, with individual resolutions ranging from under $1 million to an $11.65 million judgment against a national restaurant chain.
Corporate legal departments surveyed by Carlton Fields identified labor, consumer fraud, and data privacy as their three primary risk areas going into 2026. With bellwether trials approaching in both the social media and GLP-1 cases, those outcomes will likely shape the next wave of resolutions.