The British publisher behind the Harry Potter series, Bloomsbury Publishing, is set to receive a multimillion-dollar payout as a beneficiary of a record $1.5 billion copyright settlement approved this week in a US dispute involving AI company Anthropic. The US District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval to the agreement on July 20, resolving claims that Anthropic obtained millions of pirated books to develop its Claude AI models. A court list includes 14,087 of Bloomsbury’s titles eligible for compensation, with each qualifying work expected to receive about $3,000 before legal fees, generally divided equally between the publisher and the author. Payments are expected in installments, with the first likely in the second half of the company’s financial year. Anthropic has denied wrongdoing and did not admit liability, maintaining that the use of copyrighted works was protected by the fair-use doctrine. The settlement stems from a 2024 lawsuit filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, which later developed into a class action covering hundreds of thousands of books.