Lawsuit tracker
Bartz v. Anthropic
Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, No. 24-cv-05417 (N.D. Cal.)
| Plaintiffs | Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, on behalf of a certified class of rightsholders in roughly 482,460 books |
|---|---|
| Defendants | Anthropic PBC |
| Court | U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California |
| Filed | 2024-08-19 |
| Status | Settled |
| Content type | Books — trade and academic titles from the LibGen and PiLiMi pirate libraries, plus purchased-and-scanned print copies |
| Last updated | 2026-07-21 |
The claims
Direct copyright infringement: downloading books from pirate libraries and copying them to train the Claude models
What has happened
Three authors sued Anthropic in August 2024 over the books behind Claude. Discovery showed Anthropic had downloaded about seven million books from the pirate libraries LibGen and PiLiMi, and had separately bought and scanned millions of print books. In June 2025, Judge William Alsup split the case: training on lawfully acquired books was fair use, but downloading and keeping pirated copies was not. He certified a class of pirated-library rightsholders in July 2025 and set a December 2025 damages trial, with theoretical statutory exposure above $70 billion. The parties settled for $1.5 billion — about $3,000 per covered work — plus destruction of the pirated files. Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted final approval on July 20, 2026, cutting attorneys’ fees to about $101.6 million from the $187.5 million requested.
Key developments
- 2024-08-19 — Bartz, Graeber and Johnson file a proposed class action in the Northern District of California.
- 2025-06-23 — Judge Alsup rules that training on lawfully acquired books is fair use, but that downloading and retaining pirated-library copies is not.
- 2025-07-17 — Alsup certifies a class of rightsholders whose books Anthropic downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi; a piracy damages trial is set for December 2025.
- 2025-09-05 — The parties disclose a $1.5 billion settlement covering about 482,460 works — the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history.
- 2025-09-25 — The court grants preliminary approval and opens the claims process.
- 2026-03-23 — Claims deadline passes; class counsel later report claims covering over 90 percent of eligible works.
- 2026-07-20 — Judge Martínez-Olguín grants final approval, trims attorneys’ fees to about $101.6 million, and notes the settlement sets no binding precedent.
Why it matters for training data
The case split the market question in two: what you train on matters less than how you got it. Training on purchased, scanned books survived as fair use at the district level, while pirated sourcing produced the largest copyright settlement on record. For data buyers, roughly $3,000 per book is now the reference number for unlicensed shadow-library exposure. The settlement bought a release for past conduct only — no forward license, no output coverage, and expressly no precedent — so it prices past piracy without settling the law.
Sources
- Reuters via U.S. News: judge approves Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement (July 20, 2026)
- Kluwer Copyright Blog: understanding the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement
- Authors Alliance: settlement receives final approval
- Chat GPT Is Eating the World: final approval order and reduced fee award
- Official settlement administration site
Deeper analysis
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