Written by: Haim Ravia, Dotan Hammer
On July 20, 2026, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the Northern District of California granted final approval of the class action settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC (Case No. 3:24-cv-05417-AMO), concluding the largest copyright class action settlement in history. Under the settlement, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion plus interest to a class of copyright owners whose works were allegedly torrented and commercially exploited from pirated datasets — specifically Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) — to train Anthropic’s large language models.
The certified class encompasses all beneficial or legal copyright owners of books found in the versions of LibGen or PiLiMi downloaded by Anthropic, as identified on a Works List containing 482,460 works, each possessing an ISBN or ASIN and a U.S. Copyright Office registration within five years of first publication. The court confirmed that the estimated per-work payment of approximately $3,000 is four times the statutory minimum for willful copyright infringement. As of April 16, 2026, 91.3% of works on the Works List had been claimed — a claims rate the court described as “magnitudes above the average for class action cases.”
The court found the settlement fair, reasonable, and adequate, noting that success at trial was not assured and that a multi-billion-dollar verdict could itself create due process risks. The settlement grants a past-only release for conduct up to August 25, 2025, and explicitly does not release claims related to AI outputs or future conduct. Anthropic must destroy all original files of works torrented from LibGen or PiLiMi and any copies derived from them.
On attorney’s fees, the court rejected Class Counsel’s request for 12.5% of the settlement fund ($187.5 million). This would have yielded a 6.92 lodestar multiplier, representing nearly seven times the product of a lawyer’s hours worked and a fair hourly rate. The court indicated this would be “far outside the range of multipliers found to be reasonable in mega fund cases.” The court awarded $101,561,111 (approximately 6.8% of the fund), applying a multiplier of 3.75 on Class Counsel’s total lodestar of $27,082,963. The court also approved $2,635,197.46 in litigation expenses and an $18,220,000 cost reserve for settlement administration, and awarded $15,000 (reduced from the requested $50,000) to each of the three class representatives.
Click here to read the federal court’s Order Granting Final Approval of Class Action Settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC.
