A billion and a half for books
The court granted final approval to the settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic: one and a half billion dollars to authors, about three thousand per work.
Why it matters
Using other people's books for training acquired a price set by a court rather than by negotiation.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín put the award of about three thousand dollars per work at four times the minimum statutory damages, and the same order entered judgment and dismissed the case. Notice went to 594,945 potential class members, and for 99.5 per cent of the works on the list it was not returned as undeliverable. The basis of the claim is not the training itself, which Judge Alsup had held a fair use in June 2025, but the downloading and retention of pirated copies. That distinction is what sets the price: the payment is not for what the model learned but for how the books entered the corpus.