A federal judge in San Francisco has given the final green light to the $1.5 billion agreement between Anthropic and a group of authors and publishers that They reported her for using her books without permission to train Claude. And after extracting millions of books from digital libraries without authorization, and from physical bookstores to scan and destroy en masse, everything has ended up being settled with money.
What has happened? Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin definitively approved this Monday the agreement that Anthropic reached with the plaintiffs, as collect Reuters. The figure was already known since last year, when Judge William Alsup gave his preliminary approval, but this last step was missing for the money to begin to be distributed.
How we got here. A group of writers sued Anthropic in 2024 accusing her of using copies of her books to train Claude without her consent. Judge Alsup ruled in June 2025 that training AI with copyrighted books falls under “fair use,” a decision that set an important precedent for the entire industry.
The judge also clarified that, although training with those books was legal, Anthropic had broken the law by downloading more than 7 million copies from digital portals without authorization and storing them in a kind of internal library that was not necessarily intended for training, according to explains Reuters. That specific point was going to be decided in a separate trial, with compensation that could skyrocket to hundreds of billions of dollars. So to avoid this, Anthropic preferred to make an agreement.
Between the lines. As we explained some time ago, the court documents that came to light revealed the real scope of the project, baptized “Panama”, and with which the company came to physically buy and scan millions of bookscutting their loins to digitize them and then recycling them. Before going this route, Anthropic employees, including its co-founder Ben Mann, had downloaded books directly from unauthorized repositories such as LibGen.
The company has always maintained that this content was never used to train a business model, but it was precisely that part of the process that took it to court.
How much and to whom. The distribution is made at a rate of about 3,000 dollars per work, out of an estimated total of 500,000 titles between authors and publishers, according to details TechCrunch. Aparna Sridhar, deputy general counsel at Anthropic, said in a statement that the company reached this agreement in 2025 after the ruling that recognized training with books as fair use, and added that more than 91% of the affected authors and publishers have already claimed their share of the payment. For his part, Justin Nelson, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, has called the settlement “historic” and has stated that it represents the largest copyright recovery ever achieved, according to collect also Reuters.
Not everyone is satisfied. Some authors have raised objections, arguing that the amount was insufficient, benefiting plaintiff’s lawyers too much or unfairly leaving out certain rights holders. Judge Martinez-Olguin has rejected these arguments, considering that they did not realistically reflect the risks of having gone to trial, and approved fees of more than $101 million for the lawyers, below the $187.5 million they had requested. according to Reuters.
Some authors and publishers directly opted out of the agreement and have their own lawsuits against Anthropic that are still ongoing.
Why it is important. This closure does not resolve the underlying legal debate for the rest of the sector. And since it is an agreement and not an appealed ruling, Alsup’s decision on “legitimate use” will never reach an appeal court, so it does not constitute binding jurisprudence, as underlines TechCrunch.
Each judge is free to interpret similar cases in their own way, and that is just what is happening with the lawsuits opened against Google, Meta, Midjourney and OpenAI for similar reasons.
Cover image | Anthropic, edited by Xataka
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