New Judge to Preside Over Anthropic Copyright Suit
Judge William Alsup of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, who had been presiding over rightsholders’ class action copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, has retired. He is succeeded by Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, who will now oversee the case against the AI firm.
Judge Alsup’s rulings broadly found that the use of books to train Anthropic's Claude AI fell under fair use, but that the use of pirated books to do so was itself illegal. Anthropic has since agreed to a $1.5 billion payout, the terms of which, including attorneys’ fees, have not been settled.
Judge Martínez-Olguín previously presided over a similar case led by authors against OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT. In April 2025, a judicial panel combined this case and around a dozen other lawsuits from writers and news outlets into a single multidistrict litigation in New York City under U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein.
