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23 July 2026•Update: 23 July 2026
The British publisher behind the globally popular Harry Potter series is set to receive a multimillion-dollar payout as one of the biggest beneficiaries of a record $1.5 billion settlement approved this week in a US copyright dispute involving artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic.
The US District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval to the agreement on July 20, resolving claims that Anthropic obtained millions of pirated books to help develop its Claude AI models.
In a statement Wednesday, Bloomsbury Publishing confirmed that it was among the beneficiaries of the class-action settlement.
A court list includes 14,087 of the company’s titles eligible for compensation. Each qualifying work is expected to receive about $3,000 before legal fees and other costs, with the payout generally divided equally between the publisher and the author.
Payments to rights holders, including Bloomsbury, are expected to be made in installments, with the first likely to arrive in the second half of the company’s financial year.
Anthropic has denied wrongdoing and did not admit liability under the settlement. The company has maintained that the use of copyrighted works to train its AI models was protected by the fair-use doctrine.
The settlement stems from a 2024 lawsuit filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. They accused Anthropic of downloading large numbers of copyrighted books from unauthorized online libraries, known as shadow libraries, to train its AI models.
The case later developed into a class action covering hundreds of thousands of books.
The agreement marks the first major settlement to emerge from dozens of copyright lawsuits filed in the US against AI companies on behalf of authors, publishers and news organizations.
