Bartz v. Anthropic
In plain wordsA US lawsuit by book authors against the AI company Anthropic that ended in a record $1.5 billion settlement, after a judge ruled that training on purchased books was legal but keeping pirated copies was not.
A class action filed in 2024 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson against Anthropic, developer of the Claude models. On June 23, 2025, Judge William Alsup held on summary judgment that training language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. on books Anthropic had bought and scanned was fair use, calling it 'exceedingly transformative', but that downloading millions of pirated books from Books3Books3, prop. n.: A collection of nearly 200,000 pirated e-books, assembled in 2020 and used to train several AI language models, which became central to lawsuits by authors over AI training. and the shadow libraries Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) to keep in a permanent central library was not. After he certified a class of rights holders in books downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi, the parties settled in September 2025 for $1.5 billion, about $3,100 per work for some 482,000 works, plus destruction of the pirated files. Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted final approval in July 2026, cutting class counsel's fee award to about $101.6 million from the $187.5 million requested. The settlement released only past conduct and did not cover claims based on model outputs.
After Bartz v. Anthropic, our data team documents the provenance of every book in the corpus.
Origin
Filed in August 2024; the June 2025 order was among the first US rulings on whether training generative AI on copyrighted books is fair use, issued two days before the ruling in Kadrey v. Meta.
Usage note
The fair-use holding binds no other court, but it shaped the field by separating the lawfulness of training from the lawfulness of how training copies were obtained.
Related
- fair use and AI trainingfair use and AI training, phr.: The unsettled US legal question of whether AI companies may copy books, articles, pictures and music to train their models without permission, under the rule that allows some unlicensed uses of copyrighted work.
- AI copyright litigationAI copyright litigation, n.: The many lawsuits in which authors, artists, news organizations, record labels and others accuse AI companies of copying their work without permission to build or run AI models.
- Books3Books3, prop. n.: A collection of nearly 200,000 pirated e-books, assembled in 2020 and used to train several AI language models, which became central to lawsuits by authors over AI training.
- New York Times v. OpenAINew York Times v. OpenAI, prop. n.: A major lawsuit, filed in 2023, in which The New York Times accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of copying millions of its articles to train ChatGPT and of letting the chatbot reproduce its journalism.
- training datatraining data, n.: The examples an AI system learns from. Whatever patterns, skills, gaps and biases are in the training data tend to show up in the finished system.
- AnthropicAnthropic, prop. n.: An American AI company that makes the Claude chatbot and models. It was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff and puts particular emphasis on AI safety research.
Sources
- Authors Alliance (2026). Bartz v. Anthropic Settlement Receives Final Approval. July 21, 2026. authorsalliance.org/2026/07/21/bartz-v-anthropic-settlement-receives-final-approval
- ChatGPT Is Eating the World (2026). Judge Martínez-Olguín approves historic Bartz v. Anthropic class action settlement but reduces attorneys' fee award to $101,561,111 instead of $187,500,000 sought. July 20, 2026. chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2026/07/20/judge-martinez-olguin-approves-historic-bartz-v-anthropic-class-action-settlement-but-reduces-attorneys-fee-award-to-101561111-instead-of-187500000-sought
Mentioned in
AI copyright litigationAI copyright litigation, n.: The many lawsuits in which authors, artists, news organizations, record labels and others accuse AI companies of copying their work without permission to build or run AI models., fair use and AI trainingfair use and AI training, phr.: The unsettled US legal question of whether AI companies may copy books, articles, pictures and music to train their models without permission, under the rule that allows some unlicensed uses of copyrighted work., Books3Books3, prop. n.: A collection of nearly 200,000 pirated e-books, assembled in 2020 and used to train several AI language models, which became central to lawsuits by authors over AI training., New York Times v. OpenAINew York Times v. OpenAI, prop. n.: A major lawsuit, filed in 2023, in which The New York Times accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of copying millions of its articles to train ChatGPT and of letting the chatbot reproduce its journalism.