Judge William Alsup

William Haskell Alsup (born 1945) is a senior United States district judge for the Northern District of California, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and assuming senior status in 2021. Before the bench he was a litigator at Morrison & Foerster and a clerk to Justice William O. Douglas at the Supreme Court.

Alsup has become the de facto judge for many of the technology sector's most consequential cases. He presided over Oracle v. Google over Java APIs (a years-long battle that reached the US Supreme Court in 2021), the Uber-Waymo trade-secrets trial (2018), and a steady docket of class actions against major US tech firms. He is known for taking unusual technical preparation seriously — famously learning Java to better understand the Oracle v. Google issues — and for sharp, plain-language rulings.

In Lowdown's media-AI pivot coverage, Alsup is the presiding judge in Bartz v. Anthropic, the authors and publishers class action settlement that surfaced as a $1.5bn figure on News Corp's Q3 FY26 earnings call (EVREF:3185). At a 14 May 2026 final-approval hearing (EVREF:3382 — the U#2 event), Alsup declined to grant final approval, asking for more detail on attorneys-fees and lead-plaintiff payments. Anthropic has already paid $300m into the settlement fund; a further $300m is due within five days of final approval. The hearing reschedule is the next anchor in the publisher-AI commercial-template story; the structure Alsup signs off on sets the de facto liability floor on unlicensed AI scraping for the industry.