July 20, 2026
AAP Welcomes Court’s Final Settlement Approval in Bartz v. Anthropic
Today, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the parties’ proposed class settlement of certain infringement claims in Bartz v. Anthropic. The agreement requires Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to the authors and publishers of nearly half a million books it downloaded from notorious pirate sites, as well as destroy all the original files of works torrented and downloaded from those sites and any copies that originate from the torrented copies. In aggregate, this decision marks the largest class action copyright settlement in history, with a reported claims rate of 92.77 percent. As defined by the court, the class includes legal or beneficial copyright owners, specifically the owners of the exclusive right to reproduce copies, of any book that was downloaded by Anthropic through Library Genesis (LibGen) in June 2021 or from Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) in July 2022, has an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) or Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN), was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office within five years of first publication, and was registered before being downloaded by Anthropic, or within three months of first publication. The class covers hundreds of thousands of works of AAP member companies and their authors, and many other works.
Statement from AAP President and CEO Maria A. Pallante:
“We applaud the court’s final approval of this settlement, which represents an important victory in the larger battle to hold big tech accountable for its unscrupulous appropriation of intellectual and creative properties that clearly belong to authors and publishers. In this case, the court recognized that downloading from pirate sites is not a choice we should simply accept as an efficiency for the infringer; on the contrary, it’s abhorrent conduct that should never be normalized.
Nor should fair use extend to training, which can easily be licensed like every other digital use in the modern copyright economy. Tech companies might like a copyright law with a giant hole in the place of exclusive rights, but that law does not exist. Partnerships, not piracy, are the best path forward.”
The order granting final approval can be found here.