Anthropic is now officially cleared to distribute payments to a group of authors and book publishers who had sued the AI company for copyright infringement. According to Reuters, a federal judge gave final approval on Monday to Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion settlement in a class action copyright lawsuit. Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California had initially issued preliminary approval for the settlement last year, after determining that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books. Alsup has since retired, and Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin formally signed off on the settlement this Monday.

The payout will provide $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, to be shared among the authors and publishers who hold the rights to them. Although this settlement is believed to be the largest in U.S. copyright law history, many authors and creators still do not view it as a victory. This is because of how the central legal question was resolved. Alsup sided with Anthropic on the core issue, ruling that training an AI model on copyrighted text qualifies as fair use—a decision widely seen as a turning point for the AI industry.

However, the ruling did not excuse how Anthropic originally obtained the books. The company built its training library from two sources: books it purchased and scanned (which was deemed acceptable), and books it downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Alsup found the second method illegal on its own merits and stated that the piracy question could proceed to trial. To avoid a trial and the potential for a jury to award additional damages, Anthropic soon agreed to the settlement.

While this final approval closes out the current case, it does not settle the legal question across the entire industry. Alsup’s ruling was a single district court decision, and because Anthropic chose to settle, the case will never reach an appeals court to become binding precedent. Other judges remain free to reach their own conclusions based on their own facts, and that is precisely what is happening elsewhere. There is still a series of copyright lawsuits against companies such as Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI, all centered on whether it is legal to train AI models on copyrighted works. Just last week, a group of publishers and authors—including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E.—filed a class action lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of using their copyrighted works to train its AI platform, Gemini.