ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (‘AI’) MODEL TRAINING and anthropocentric authorship have collided in Bartz v. Anthropic, the recently settled class action in which authors sued the AI firm Anthropic for training its Claude model on pirated books.
The stakes could not be higher: this $1.5 billion deal, the largest U.S. copyright settlement ever, signals to the booming AI industry that taking free literary "raw material" from shadow libraries comes at immense cost. The deal sends a message that taking copyrighted works from pirate websites is against the statutory rights granted under copyright law. Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger hailed the settlement as "a vital step" and warned that AI companies "cannot simply steal authors' creative work…just because they need books to develop quality LLMs".
This clash between AI's feeding on data and the Constitution's promise to reward authors is playing out in court, and its resolution will influence how machine learning models are built and governed.
Chronology of Bartz v. Anthropic (2024–2025): In August 2024, nonfiction authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Johnson sued Anthropic, alleging it had copied their books to train its AI without permission. In June 2025, Judge William Haskell Alsup held in a summary judgment that training Claude on legally acquired books was "transformative" fair use, but he refused to excuse Anthropic's mass downloading of pirated books. By July, the court certified a class of all registered rightsholders whose works were taken from known pirate sites (LibGen and PiLiMi). The parties announced a $1.5 billion settlement on September 5, 2025, which Judge Alsup preliminarily approved on a September 25 hearing.
