Anthropic's $1.5B Author Settlement Wins Final Approval: Only 350 Writers Opted Out

A federal judge in San Francisco signed off Monday on Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with a class of authors whose books the AI company had downloaded from pirate libraries, closing the largest copyright class action ever certified in the United States. The order is short on celebration and long on arithmetic: what fees lawyers can take, what each book is worth, and how many authors had to walk away from the deal to call the price wrong.

US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the deal on July 20, according to the order filed in Bartz v. Anthropic. It ends a case that had already established one precedent: training an AI on books can be fair use, but stealing the books first is not. Now it sets a second one, the going rate for settling it.

The participation numbers are what made the closing real. Class notice reached about 95% of the members, and roughly 91% of authors and publishers have already filed claims, according to Ars Technica's coverage of the order. Only 350 authors opted out of the deal entirely, with another 54 formally objecting or filing late opt-out requests such as the one songwriter Donald Passman submitted on June 30. For a class measured in the millions, a 350-person opt-out is the clearest signal that the deal was acceptable to the people it was supposed to compensate.

The per-work payout is roughly $3,000. The judge described that figure as "four times the minimum statutory damages," the floor that federal copyright law sets for non-willful infringement, currently $750 per work and indexed to inflation. Anchoring the payout to that legal baseline matters because it lets every future plaintiff argue that their books are worth at least what Bartz's books were, without having to prove specific market harm.

The $3,000 figure is also where the criticism lives. In May, a group of authors objected that the per-work math was too low and the lawyers' cut was too high. The judge overruled the objections as meritless but did not erase the underlying complaint: a $3,000 check does not match the popular image of a $1.5 billion fund, and the authors who said so out loud in May are still on the record. Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, the lead plaintiffs' firm, called the same result the largest copyright settlement ever reached.

The fee cut is where the new precedent sits. Plaintiffs' lawyers originally asked for 20% of the fund, or roughly $300 million. They came down to 12.5%, or about $187 million, in the final ask. The judge cut it to under 7% of the fund, or roughly $101 million. That is the part of Monday's order that every OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta defendant in the next wave of author lawsuits will try to read as a ceiling, and that every plaintiffs' firm will try to read as a floor. The original class certification, which Anthropic called the largest copyright class action ever, made this case too big to settle quietly. The fee ruling is what makes the next ones winnable.