{"id":114481,"date":"2026-07-22T07:08:48","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T07:08:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/114481\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T07:08:48","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T07:08:48","slug":"judge-gives-final-approval-of-1-5-billion-anthropic-settlement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/114481\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge Gives Final Approval of $1.5 Billion Anthropic Settlement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"article\">After a longer-than-expected waiting period, Judge Araceli Mart\u00ednez-Olgu\u00edn 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. <\/p>\n<p class=\"article\"><a href=\"https:\/\/publishers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Order-Granting-Final-Approval-of-Settlement171.pdf\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">In her ruling,<\/a> Mart\u00ednez-Olgu\u00edn found that the agreement \u201cprovides meaningful relief to the Settlement Class given the reasonable range of Class Members\u2019 possible recoveries, especially since further litigation would likely be complex, expensive, lengthy, and risky.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"article\">She also noted that the estimated per-work payment of approximately $3,000 \u201cis four times the minimum statutory damages amount for willful infringement,\u201d and \u201cfour times the statutory minimum for ordinary infringement, which is also the most common award in copyright cases, of $750.\u201d The judge reasoned that the settlement \u201cprovides substantial benefits to the Class in light of the novel claims asserted,\u201d and \u201csuccess at trial was not assured, and a loss would have left the Class with no recourse.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"article\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.publishersweekly.com\/pw\/by-topic\/digital\/copyright\/article\/98089-federal-judge-rules-ai-training-is-fair-use-in-anthropic-copyright-case.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">The initial ruling by U.S. District Judge William Alsup<\/a>\u2014 who retired at the end of 2025, prompting Mart\u00ednez-Olgu\u00edn to take over\u2014found that while Anthropic\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article\">Anthropic illegally downloaded some 500,000 titles, and 92% of those eligible for an award\u2014both authors and publishers are entitled to payment\u2014had opted into the class action. Mart\u00ednez-Olgu\u00edn denied all but two requests to opt out of the agreement.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article\">\u201cWe applaud the court\u2019s 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,\u201d said Maria Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, in a statement.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article\">Pallante praised the court for recognizing that downloading from pirate sites \u201cis not a choice we should simply accept as an efficiency for the infringer; on the contrary, it\u2019s abhorrent conduct that should never be normalized.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After a longer-than-expected waiting period, Judge Araceli Mart\u00ednez-Olgu\u00edn has given her final approval to the landmark $1.5 billion&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114482,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[24,53,54937,57835,16035,7412,58488,6964,58489],"class_list":["post-114481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-association-of-american-publishers","tag-bartz-v-anthropic","tag-class-action","tag-copyright","tag-judge-araceli-martinez-olguin","tag-lawsuit","tag-maria-pallante"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}