After a longer-than-expected waiting period, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín has given her final approval to the landmark $1.5 billion settlement in the class action lawsuit brought against Anthropic in 2024 for engaging in copyright infringement to build its large language models.
In her ruling, Martínez-Olguín found that the agreement “provides meaningful relief to the Settlement Class given the reasonable range of Class Members’ possible recoveries, especially since further litigation would likely be complex, expensive, lengthy, and risky.”
She also noted that the estimated per-work payment of approximately $3,000 “is four times the minimum statutory damages amount for willful infringement,” and “four times the statutory minimum for ordinary infringement, which is also the most common award in copyright cases, of $750.” The judge reasoned that the settlement “provides substantial benefits to the Class in light of the novel claims asserted,” and “success at trial was not assured, and a loss would have left the Class with no recourse.”
The initial ruling by U.S. District Judge William Alsup— who retired at the end of 2025, prompting Martínez-Olguín to take over—found that while Anthropic’s use of legally acquired copyrighted books to train large language models constitutes fair use, downloading pirated copies of those books for permanent storage violates copyright law. Anthropic had acknowledged that it used pirated books downloaded from Library Genesis and from Pirate Library Mirror.
Anthropic illegally downloaded some 500,000 titles, and 92% of those eligible for an award—both authors and publishers are entitled to payment—had opted into the class action. Martínez-Olguín denied all but two requests to opt out of the agreement.
“We applaud the court’s final approval of this settlement, which represents an important victory in the larger battle to hold big tech accountable for its unscrupulous appropriation of intellectual and creative properties that clearly belong to authors and publishers,” said Maria Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, in a statement.
Pallante praised the court for recognizing that downloading from pirate sites “is not a choice we should simply accept as an efficiency for the infringer; on the contrary, it’s abhorrent conduct that should never be normalized.” She also argued that fair use should not be extended to allow tech companies to copy copyrighted materials, and that tech giants should look to licensing agreements to train their AI models.