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Bloomberg Law(September 25, 2025)– A California federal judge granted preliminary approval of Anthropic PBC’s $1.5 billion settlement to resolve authors’ copyright class action over the AI company’s downloading of millions of pirated books.

Judge William Alsup said the settlement is “fair” and acknowledged potential complications with the claims process given the number of stakeholders. Lawyers need to be “excellent” to successfully manage the deal to an “ethical” end, he said.

“We have some of the best lawyers in America in the courtroom right now and I think you can do it,” Alsup said during the Thursday hearing in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Anthropic will pay about $3,000 for each of the 482,460 books it downloaded from pirate libraries Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, and destroy the original and copied files. The parties struck a deal in August after the AI startup said it faced “inordinate pressure” to settle and avoid paying upwards of $1 trillion in statutory damages at a trial scheduled for December.

“We are grateful for the Court’s action today, which brings us one step closer to real accountability for Anthropic and puts all AI companies on notice they can’t shortcut the law or override creators’ rights,” said the class plaintiffs, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson in a press release.

The deal is one of the first in the dozens of copyright lawsuits pending against AI giants including OpenAI Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., and Midjourney Inc., setting a potential benchmark for the companies to resolve similar claims.

Authors sued Anthropic in August 2024, alleging the AI company infringed their works by using them to train large language models. Anthropic secured a partial win in June when Alsup ruled that training AI on copyrighted works is fair use, but left to a jury piracy claims regarding the company’s downloading over 7 million copies of pirated books from two “shadow” libraries.

The decision comes weeks after Alsup on Sept. 8 postponed approval of the deal and slammed class lawyers over concerns they were striking a deal behind the scenes that would be forced “down the throat of authors.” Alsup raised questions about how the settlement would be executed across an expansive list of stakeholders, including how allocation disputes will be handled. Read more here.