Technology History | 450 Golden Gate Avenue — The Ruling That Separated Training From Piracy

On 23 June 2025 a judge in this building cut the case against Anthropic in half, and both halves have been quoted against each other ever since.

Bartz v. Anthropic was filed here on 19 August 2024 by three authors, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, as case 3:24-cv-05417 in the Northern District of California.

Judge William Alsup was ruling on Anthropic's motion for summary judgment on fair use, not on the whole dispute.

Training large language models on books the company had lawfully acquired was fair use, he held, and so was scanning bought print copies and discarding the paper, because the digital file replaced the physical one rather than adding to it.

Downloading books from the shadow libraries Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror and keeping them in a permanent general-purpose library was not.

That second holding sent the piracy question towards trial, where statutory damages can reach $150,000 for a single work.

The certified class covered a Works List of 482,460 titles, which put the theoretical exposure in the tens of billions.

Anthropic settled in September 2025 for $1.5 billion, about $3,000 a work, and agreed to destroy the downloaded files; the company has stated that neither dataset went into the training corpus of any model it released commercially.

Alsup gave preliminary approval on 25 September 2025, having refused to sign a fortnight earlier over the claims process.

He retired before the case closed.

On 20 July 2026 Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted final approval, overruled every objection, and cut the plaintiffs' lawyers from the $187.5 million they had asked for to about $101.6 million.

Class counsel reported that more than 91 percent of the listed works had been claimed, against a rate closer to ten percent in a typical class action.

It has been reported as the largest known settlement of a United States copyright case, and the first of the AI training suits to reach one.

The Phillip Burton Federal Building stands at Golden Gate Avenue and Polk Street, and the district court's galleries inside it are open to the public.

Photo: Marincyclist, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sources: reporting by Reuters, TechCrunch and JURIST; the Authors Guild; Norton Rose Fulbright; Wiggin and Dana; Pearl Cohen.