A federal judge has granted final approval of Anthropic‘s $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit, concluding a case that saw the AI lab pay $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works. The settlement, believed to be the largest in U.S. copyright history, resolves claims that Anthropic illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books from pirate sites such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.

Judge William Alsup had previously ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text constitutes fair use — a core victory for the AI industry. However, he also found that Anthropic‘s method of acquiring books from pirate sites was illegal on its own terms. Rather than face a trial on that piracy question, Anthropic agreed to the settlement. Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed the final approval after Alsup’s retirement.

Because the settlement prevents the case from reaching an appeals court, Alsup’s fair use ruling is not binding precedent. Other judges remain free to decide similar cases on their own facts, and a string of lawsuits against Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI continues. Last week, publishers including Hachette, Cengage, and Elsevier, along with author Scott Turow, filed a class action against Google over training its Gemini platform on copyrighted works.