Case Updates

Plaintiffs' counsel filed a revised fee request on March 23, reducing their ask from 25% to 12.5% of the settlement fund. This means significantly more money is available for distribution to authors and publishers.

The March 30, 2026 deadline for filing claims has now passed. Authors and publishers who filed valid claims are now awaiting the final approval hearing and distribution calculation.

Universal Music Group, BMG, and Concord filed separate suits in January and March 2026 alleging Anthropic torrented over 20,000 copyrighted musical compositions using BitTorrent. The suits name founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. This is a separate case from Bartz v. Anthropic but signals a pattern of alleged piracy by Anthropic.

The opt-out and objections deadline was extended (from January 7) to January 29, 2026. Authors who did not opt out by this date are automatically included in the settlement class.

Investigative journalist John Carreyrou and several other authors opted out of the Bartz settlement and filed a separate action against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity. Their complaint argues that class action settlements resolve claims "for pennies on the dollar" and that individual statutory damages are higher. This case is proceeding separately.

Judge William Alsup took inactive status in December 2025. The case was randomly reassigned to Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, who will preside over the April 22, 2026 final approval hearing.

Shortly before taking inactive status, Judge Alsup issued a memorandum sharply criticizing "interloper" law firms seeking additional compensation from the class fund. He opposed any fee award to three additional firms (Cowan DeBaets, Edelson, and Oppenheim & Zebrak) seeking $75M, and questioned whether class counsel earned its full $225M. The new judge, Martinez-Olguin, inherits these fee disputes.

Court filings revealed that as of October 31, 2025, claims had been filed for only 58,788 of the 482,460 works in the settlement — approximately 12%. The vast majority of eligible claims remain unclaimed.

Judge Alsup granted preliminary approval of the $1.5 billion settlement. The settlement fund breakdown: $300M paid immediately, $300M upon final approval, $450M within 12 months, $450M within 24 months. Payments can accelerate if Anthropic completes a qualifying financing event or IPO.

Judge Alsup certified the class, defining it to include all legal/beneficial copyright owners of books in the LibGen and PiLiMi datasets that met qualification criteria (ISBN/ASIN + US Copyright Office registration). 482,460 works made the cut.

Anthropic and plaintiffs announced a $1.5 billion settlement — the largest copyright settlement in US history.

In a landmark decision, Judge Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of legally acquired books to train AI was "quintessentially transformative" fair use — but simultaneously held that downloading and retaining pirated copies from LibGen and PiLiMi was not fair use. This split decision left Anthropic facing massive liability for the piracy itself.

Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed suit against Anthropic in the Northern District of California (Case No. 3:24-cv-05417-WHA), alleging Anthropic downloaded over 7 million copyrighted books from pirate sites including Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) to train its Claude AI models.