Anthropic agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle Bartz v. Anthropic, the case over using pirated books to train Claude. The deal covered roughly 500,000 works at about $3,000 per book — the largest copyright class action settlement in US history — and required Anthropic to destroy the data it had taken from Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror. The settlement followed Judge Alsup's June ruling separating lawful training from unlawful acquisition, which left Anthropic exposed to statutory damages on the piracy claim alone. It established that how an AI company obtains its training data can carry an enormous price.