A U.S. federal judge in San Francisco on Monday (July 21, 2026) approved a $1.5 billion settlement in a copyright class action lawsuit by authors and publishers against Claude chatbot maker Anthropic.

A preliminary approval of the settlement was issued in 2025 by Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, and now Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin has issued the final approval.

The settlement is related to Anthropic using copyrighted works of authors to train its AI model. The AI lab, per the lawsuit, has used shadow libraries like LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror to access published works, violating copyright laws to develop its AI models.

The judge ruled last year that Anthropic’s use of the creative works came under fair use. However, the law took issue with the way Anthropic saved millions of pirated books.

Authors and publishers were slated to receive $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, with the payments being shared based on ownership rights.

While the settlement is a landmark development, it still represents a mixed result for many authors and creators. Several continue to call for stricter laws to protect creative works from being pirated and/or scraped by AI companies to develop their future models. Other creators’ lawsuits against Anthropic over related issues are still pending.

While some are focused on fairly compensating authors for AI-related use of their works, others want to see violators being more strictly penalised and fined around the world.

Multiple similar lawsuits against AI companies such as Google, Meta, and OpenAI are also ongoing. As Anthropic’s case ended in a settlement in this instance, it remains to be seen how other U.S. judges will interpret book piracy allegations that authors have levelled against AI companies.