At the 14 May 2026 fairness hearing in Bartz v Anthropic, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín took the $1.5bn class settlement under submission with a claims rate of 92.77%, covering 447,576 of 482,460 works 1. On around 18 May the judge ordered supplemental briefing, due 21 May, on whether unexcused late opt-outs should be honoured. The fee petition stands at $187.5m, and final approval has not been entered.
Bartz v Anthropic is a copyright class action over authors' works used to train Anthropic's AI models, heard in the Northern District of California. A fairness hearing is the stage at which a judge decides whether a proposed class settlement is fair to the people it binds. "Taking it under submission" means the judge has reserved judgement rather than approving on the day. The late-opt-out question matters because every author who exits the class keeps the right to sue Anthropic separately, which changes both the defendant's exposure and the value of the deal on the table.
The settlement's headline figure tracks a number already circulating in the publishing industry. News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson read an anticipated $1.5bn Anthropic figure into his Q3 earnings transcript . The class-action result functions as a reference price: it sets the floor beneath which no publisher will license content to an AI developer, because litigation now offers a quantified alternative. A clean approval hardens that floor; a reopening on opt-outs leaves it provisional, and every bilateral negotiation waits on which way Judge Martínez-Olguín rules.
