{"slug": "anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved", "title": "Anthropic’s landmark $1.5B copyright settlement is approved", "summary": "A federal judge on Monday gave final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, resolving claims that the AI lab illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books. The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, but the settlement does not settle the broader legal question of whether training AI on copyrighted text is fair use, leaving other lawsuits against Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI to proceed.", "body_md": "Anthropic can finally start cutting checks to a group of authors and book publishers that sued the AI lab over copyright infringement. A federal judge gave final approval Monday of Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit, [Reuters reported](https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-15-billion-settlement-copyright-lawsuit-2026-07-20/).\n\nJudge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary approval of the settlement last year, after ruling that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books.\n\nAlsup has since retired and Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on the settlement on Monday.\n\nThe payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them. While the settlement is believed to be the [largest in the history of U.S. copyright law,](https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/05/screw-the-money-anthropics-1-5b-copyright-settlement-sucks-for-writers/) many authors and creators still don’t view it as a win.\n\nThat’s because of how the legal question was resolved. Alsup sided with Anthropic on the core issue. He ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text counts as fair use — a decision widely seen as a turning point for the AI industry. But the ruling didn’t excuse how Anthropic obtained the books in the first place. Anthropic had built its training library from two sources: books it purchased and scanned (fine), and books it downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Alsup found the second method illegal on its own terms and said that piracy question could go to trial; Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon after to avoid a trial and whatever damages a jury might have awarded.\n\nWhile the final approval closes out this case, it doesn’t settle the legal question industry-wide because Alsup’s ruling was a single district court decision, and Anthropic’s decision to settle means the case will never reach an appeals court to become binding precedent.\n\nOther judges are still free to reach their own conclusions on their own facts, which is exactly what’s playing out elsewhere. There is still a string of copyright lawsuits against companies such as Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI over whether it’s legal to train AI models on copyrighted works. Just last week, a group of publishers and authors, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a [class action lawsuit](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/14/google-faces-another-ai-training-lawsuit-from-major-publishers/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) against Google over accusations that the company used their copyrighted works to train its AI platform, Gemini.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved", "canonical_source": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/20/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved/", "published_at": "2026-07-21 00:12:24+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-21 00:23:41.987524+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-policy", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["Anthropic", "William Alsup", "Araceli Martinez-Olguin", "Google", "Meta", "Midjourney", "OpenAI", "Hachette"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved.jsonld"}}