AIster · The agentic age · Laws & rulings
Anthropic agrees $1.5 billion settlement with authors
The largest copyright recovery on record, over books taken from pirate libraries
Key facts
- Date
- 5–25 Sep 2025
- Era
- The agentic age
- Interest
- Laws & rulings
- Threads
- Labs & people
- Amount
- $1.5 billion, about $3,000 per work
- Works
- About 482,000 books on the settlement Works List
- Timeline
- Announced 5 Sep 2025; preliminary approval 25 Sep 2025; final approval 20 Jul 2026
- Book sources
- Pirate libraries including LibGen and PiLiMi
In Bartz v. Anthropic, a case brought by authors, a judge ruled in June 2025 that training AI on books was fair use (a US legal defence for some unlicensed uses of copyrighted work) but left open claims over pirated copies Anthropic had downloaded. Anthropic agreed on 5 September 2025 to pay $1.5 billion, about $3,000 per work, and to destroy the pirated data. Judge William Alsup granted preliminary approval on 25 September.
Sources
- Anthropic Copyright Settlement (court-approved settlement website), Bartz, et al. v. Anthropic PBC, 2026-09-15
- Fortune, Anthropic reaches $1.5 Billion settlement with authors in landmark copyright case, 2025-09-05
- Publishers Weekly, Judge Gives Preliminary Approval to Anthropic Settlement, 2025-09-26