Publishers' Lawyers Appeal Fee Ruling in Anthropic's $1.5 Billion Copyright Settlement
Two law firms brought in by publishers to help coordinate the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history have filed an appeal over how attorney fees were divided — just before the deadline expired.
Edelson and Oppenheim + Zebrak, serving as "Publishers' Coordination Counsel" in the Anthropic copyright case, filed a notice of appeal on August 19, 2026, to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The firms said they will focus their appeal on the court's order governing attorneys' fees and expense reimbursement, according to a report by Michael Cader in Publishers Marketplace on August 20, 2026. (Publishers Marketplace)
The notice targets "the Judgment entered on July 20, 2026, including all prior orders encompassed in that decision." That judgment was the final approval of a $1.5 billion settlement paid by Anthropic PBC — the AI company behind the Claude chatbot — to resolve claims that it trained its models on hundreds of thousands of pirated books. (Reuters)
The case, formally titled Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, was heard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. A judge granted final settlement approval on July 20, 2026, clearing the way for thousands of authors to receive roughly $3,000 per book that Anthropic had copied without permission. (Associated Press)
The fight now heading to the Ninth Circuit is not about whether the settlement stands. It is about who gets paid for the legal work behind it.
The copyright owners' attorneys originally asked the court for $300 million in fees, with $75 million earmarked for a specific group of firms, according to Law360. By March 2026, the lawyers had slashed their fee bid after pushback. The judge ultimately awarded class counsel about $101 million — well below the $187 million they had requested by that stage. (Reuters)
Edelson and Oppenheim + Zebrak were apparently not satisfied with their share of that award. Their appeal zeroes in on the order that determined which firms received what — the "Order Granting in Part Motion for Attorneys' Fees, Reimbursement of Expenses." Bloomberg Law reported the firms' appeal as stemming from their exclusion from the fees award. (Bloomberg Law)
The district court had ruled on the attorneys' fees motion on May 14, 2026. Anthropic itself also filed a petition under Rule 23(f) — a procedural tool that lets a party ask an appeals court to review a class-action certification before trial — which was fully briefed in the Ninth Circuit. (publishers.org)
The $1.5 billion figure makes the Anthropic settlement the largest known payout in a U.S. copyright case. It is part of a broader wave of lawsuits brought by copyright holders against AI companies over the unauthorised use of books, articles, and other creative works to train large language models. (Reuters)
For the authors covered by the settlement, the payout proceeds regardless of this appeal. For the law firms who did the work, the Ninth Circuit will now decide whether the fee-splitting was fair.
