Antitrust

Lawsuit alleged Anthropic’s Claude AI language models compromise authors’ ability to earn a living via improper and unauthorized ingestion and use of their books

On July 20, 2026, Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted final approval to a $1.5 billion class action settlement resolving claims that AI giant Anthropic violated the copyright laws by unlawfully acquiring books. “The settlement is historic. It reminds us, as if we needed reminding, of the paramount importance of books in reflecting and shaping the best of our language and thoughts, and the importance of those who write and publish them. Rightsholders came together to call foul. This is just the start”, said Lieff Cabraser partner Rachel Geman, who serves as Plaintiffs’ Co-Lead Class Counsel in the case.

The largest-known settlement of a U.S. copyright case, the lawsuit was initially filed in 2024 by writers who accused AI giant Anthropic, which created large language models including Claude, of large-scale copyright infringement. A few months before trial, and after a year of hard-fought litigation —including discovery into Anthropic’s book sources and large language models, summary judgment, and class certification- the parties reached a proposed settlement, which received overwhelming support from writers and publishers.

On July 17, 2025, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP and Susman Godfrey LLP were appointed by the federal court to serve as Co-Lead Class Counsel in the class action lawsuit against AI company Anthropic PBC for large-scale copyright infringement. The Class’ case is headed to trial in December.

Earlier in the Case

Prior to the trial slated for December 2025, plaintiffs secured a $1.5 billion settlement for authors and publishers in the copyright infringement litigation against Anthropic. The proposed settlement, which has received extraordinary, nearly universal support from the Class, will provide approximately $3,000 in compensation per work, and is believed to be the largest copyright recovery ever obtained and the first of its kind in the AI era. The core issue is Anthropic’s downloading and use of books from pirated libraries. A final approval hearing of the settlement is scheduled for May 14, 2026.

The Complaint (click to read a copy) alleged that Anthropic’s large language models were built using troves of pirated books that Anthropic “fed” to the Claude models, including works authored by Named Plaintiffs Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. According to Plaintiffs, Anthropic could not have built a model capable of generating complex text outputs without its exploitation of class members’ works.

As the Complaint summarizes, “Anthropic did what any teenager could tell you is illegal. It intentionally downloaded known pirated copies of books from the internet, made unlicensed copies of them, and then used those unlicensed copies to digest and analyze the copyrighted expression-all for its own commercial gain.”

The lawsuit seeks to give class members what they are owed: consent and compensation. Plaintiffs seek damages from Anthropic for the large-scale infringement of copyrighted works, as well as injunctive relief to prevent such improper conduct from ongoing and recurring.