---
title: "Federal judge holds back on Anthropic’s $1.5bn author settlement"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/federal-judge-holds-back-on-anthropic-s-1-5bn-author-settlement-razagb7ke
source_url: https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-book-settlement-judge-fairness-hearing
type: article
source: "The Next Web"
published: 2026-05-15T09:37:25.915Z
updated: 2026-05-15T09:37:44.726Z
tags: ["legal", "claude", "anthropic"]
reading_time: 3
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# Federal judge holds back on Anthropic’s $1.5bn author settlement

**[The Next Web](https://daily.dev/sources/tnw)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A federal judge in San Francisco declined to grant final approval to Anthropic's $1.5bn settlement with authors who alleged the company trained its Claude models on pirated books from shadow libraries LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror. Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín requested more detail on counsel fees (trimmed from 15% to 12.5%), $3m in expenses, an $18.22m cost reserve, and $50,000 service awards for each of the three lead plaintiffs before signing off. The settlement would cover roughly 480,000 works at ~$3,000 per work, with 92% of eligible works already claimed. Objections include claims the settlement is too small, inadequate notice for non-English speakers, and unfair treatment of authors with group copyright registrations. The case stems from a prior ruling that training on pirated copies was not fair use, which pushed Anthropic to settle despite disagreeing with the ruling.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-book-settlement-judge-fairness-hearing>

---

Tags: [#legal](https://daily.dev/tags/legal), [#claude](https://daily.dev/tags/claude), [#anthropic](https://daily.dev/tags/anthropic)

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