Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed a twenty-three page order on July 20, 2026 granting final approval to the $1.5 billion Bartz v. Anthropic settlement over 482,460 pirated books, overruling all fifty-four objections, cutting the class counsel fee request from $187.5 million to $101,561,111, and entering judgment. The release covers only the copying that put the books on Anthropic's servers, and no money moves until the window to appeal that judgment expires.
On July 20, 2026, inside the Northern District of California courthouse in San Francisco, Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed a twenty-three page order and shut every door fifty-four objectors had spent a year trying to keep open. Document 680 granted final approval to the settlement Anthropic negotiated over 482,460 pirated books, entered judgment, and dismissed Bartz v. Anthropic PBC with prejudice. The order borrowed a line from its own earlier ruling to describe what it had just closed: "the largest copyright class action settlement in history." The number behind that line is $1.5 billion, non-reversionary, with roughly $3,000 waiting for every claimed work, four times the statutory minimum for ordinary infringement. What she did not do was start the payment clock. That takes a thirty-day appeal window running out first, and it opened the moment she signed.
Fifty-four objections went into that order. All fifty-four came out overruled. Non-class members lost first, ruled without standing to object to a settlement that never bound them. Authors who wanted the Works List expanded lost next; the class definition says only works on that list are in the class, full stop, and claims tied to books left off it were preserved for separate suits rather than folded in. Objectors who called $1.5 billion too low lost on the math and the risk: a trial loss meant zero recovery if the case turned out to be fair use, and Anthropic's own petition to appeal class certification was already fully briefed at the Ninth Circuit when the deal got signed. Authors asking for model deletion, forced source attribution, or a ban on scanned-book training lost too. The court said those requests reached past what a copyright settlement can buy.
The record did the closing. Ninety-one percent of the Works List, 440,490 of 482,460 books, had already filed a claim by mid-April, a rate the order measured against a Southern District of New York case and called "magnitudes above the average." Three hundred fifty class members opted out cleanly, covering 1,802 works. Ten more tried to opt out late; the court let two through on a showing of a stroke and a missed notice, and shut the door on the rest, including a Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer, Donald S. Passman, who had asked his own publisher about the settlement in April and still waited until June 30 to file. Three mailed notices and one publisher conversation, the order found, add up to knowledge, not excusable neglect. His conditional objection was overruled too.
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Anthropic's cost of getting here was not only $1.5 billion. Under the Settlement Agreement the company represented, in writing, that neither the LibGen nor the PiLiMi datasets it downloaded from ever entered the training corpus of any of its commercially released models, and it agreed to destroy the original torrented files along with every copy that came from them. That is the concession that ends this case. It is not the concession that ends Anthropic's exposure. The release covers only what the company did before it built anything, the pirating and copying that put the books on its servers. It does not cover a single claim tied to what its models produce afterward, and it does not cover any conduct on or after August 25, 2025. Every one of those claims stayed on the table the moment the judge signed.
Class Counsel did not walk away with what they asked for either. Lieff Cabraser and Susman Godfrey requested $187.5 million, 12.5 percent of the fund. The order used the lodestar method instead of the percentage benchmark, found a 6.92 multiplier "far outside the range" the Ninth Circuit tolerates in megafund cases, and cut the award to $101,561,111, a 3.75 multiplier, with ten percent held back until a post-distribution accounting is filed. The three Class Representatives asked for $50,000 each and received $15,000. The money now moves on Anthropic's payment schedule into the fund, on a claims process 91 percent complete, toward class members who have already lined up for a check that a federal judge has now ordered cut.
None of that check goes out yet. The settlement agreement sets the Effective Date at the expiration of the window to appeal the final judgment, thirty days under the Ninth Circuit's general rule, and that clock started running the moment Judge Martinez-Olguin signed. What the order says about the appellate posture is narrow and worth reading exactly: Anthropic's Rule 23(f) petition "was fully briefed in the Ninth Circuit when the Settlement was reached." That was the posture before final approval. A settlement, a final approval order, and an entered judgment normally moot or reshape a permission-to-appeal petition aimed at the certification that produced them, and the order does not say what became of it. The live question the record does support is different and simpler. Fifty-four class members and putative class members put objections in front of Judge Martinez-Olguin and all fifty-four were overruled. Any one of them who is actually a class member now has thirty days to notice an appeal of the final approval itself, and until that window closes, 482,460 authors hold a $1.5 billion judgment that is final on paper and unpaid in practice. Sentinel has not seen a notice of appeal on the Ninth Circuit docket and does not assert one exists. A case dismissed with prejudice is not the same thing as a case that is over.
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