The Bartz v. Anthropic case began in 2024, when authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed a class-action lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. The plaintiffs alleged that the company collected over 7 million pirated books from websites such as LibGen and Books3 and used them to train the Claude AI system, violating copyright law.
Although the court had previously ruled that training AI models with legally obtained works could fall under “fair use,” this lawsuit focused on the unauthorized acquisition and storage of copyrighted works. According to the official Anthropic Copyright Settlement website, the agreement provides payments of approximately $3,000 per book for nearly 465,000 works.
On September 25, 2025, U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California preliminarily approved a $1.5 billion settlement in the case. The settlement, hailed as a landmark in protecting copyright against AI companies, also requires Anthropic to destroy the pirated datasets it had collected.
The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) welcomed the decision as an important step in safeguarding the interests of authors and publishers. Affected rights holders will be notified by the settlement administrator at the end of 2025, with payments expected to begin in 2026.
For more information: anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com