Of all the many pending lawsuits about AI and copyright, the Anthropic class action has been blazing trails in the US courts. The case is still not precisely over, but apparently heading toward settlement.
Update as of 9/5/25: Under the proposed settlement, Anthropic will pay about $3,000 for each of about 500,000 books used from pirate sites, for a total of at least $1.5 billion. “All works in the Class are treated the same in this settlement, entitled to the same pro-rata amount of the Settlement Fund, reflective of the per-work statutory damages remedy authorized by the Copyright Act itself. The allocation for each Class Work will be calculated by dividing the total amount of the Settlement Fund (less fees and expenses) by the total number of Class Works.”
And in case you were wondering, this summary was done almost entirely with Claude, Anthropic’s LLM, with minimal editing. So…
Background
Case: Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, Case No. 3:24-cv-05417 (N.D. Cal.)
Court Docket: CourtListener.com
Plaintiffs: Three named plaintiffs – Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson – filed a class action lawsuit against Anthropic.
The Training: Anthropic downloaded over seven million books from pirate sites and digitized millions of purchased print books to build a “central library of “all the books in the world'” to support the training of its large language models. Specifically:
- Anthropic used millions of copyrighted books to train its Claude LLMs for use with its AI services capable of generating writings that mimic the writing style of humans.
- Millions of books were downloaded from shadow library sites like Pirate Library Mirror and Library Genesis and stored in a central repository that Anthropic employees could access for model training and internal research.
- The Court relied in part on an internal Anthropic email in which an employee was tasked with obtaining “all the books in the world” while avoiding as much “legal/practice/business slog” as possible.
Legal Claims
The plaintiffs claimed Anthropic infringed their copyrights by (1) pirating copies of their works for Anthropic’s library and (2) reproducing their works to train Anthropic’s LLMs. The authors argued that use of their books to train Anthropic’s LLMs could result in the production of works that compete and displace demand for their books and that Anthropic’s unauthorized use has the potential to displace an emerging market for licensing the plaintiffs’ works for the purpose of training LLMs.
Procedural Facts
- Filed: August 19, 2024
- Complaint: Bartz et al. v. Anthropic PBC – 3:24-cv-05417
- Judge: U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California
- Motion: Anthropic moved for summary judgment on an asserted defense of fair use. Judge Alsup issued a mixed decision on June 23, 2025, granting summary judgment on some issues while denying it on others.
- Class Action Status: The case was certified as a class action on July 17, 2025.
- Interlocutory Appeal: Anthropic filed a Rule 23(f) petition seeking interlocutory appeal of Judge Alsup’s class certification in Bartz v. Anthropic.
- Motion to Stay: Anthropic moved to stay the case, pending its seeking of Rule23(f) interlocutory appeal of his class certification. Judge Alsup denied Anthropic’s request to stay the case on August 11, 2025.
- Notice of Settlement and Joint Stipulation for Stay was filed August 25, 2025 indicating hte parties were close to a settlement.
- Order re: Settlement. The case is stayed for the parties to file a settlement by September 5, 2025.
The June 23 Summary Judgment Order:
Granted Summary Judgment (Fair Use Found):
- Training LLMs: The court concluded that use of the books at issue to train Anthropic’s LLMs was “exceedingly transformative” and a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Judge Alsup wrote that the “‘purpose and character of using works to train LLMs was transformative – spectacularly so'” and described it as “quintessentially transformative.”
- Digitizing Purchased Books: The Court concluded this was fair use because the new digital copies were not redistributed, but rather, simply, convenient space-saving replacements of the discarded print copies.
Denied Summary Judgment (Not Fair Use):
- Pirated Books: The court found that downloading and copying pirated books for its library was not fair use. Because Anthropic never paid for the pirated copies, the court thought it was clear the pirated copies displaced demand for the authors’ works, copy for copy.
Fair Use Analysis
- Factor 1 (Purpose/Character): The court noted that authors cannot exclude others from using their works to learn. It noted that, for centuries, people have read and re-read books, and that the training was for the purpose of creating something different, not to supplant the works
- Factor 4 (Market Effect): The Court found that the copies used by Anthropic to train LLMs did not (and will not) displace demand for the authors’ works. The court dismissed concerns by analogizing to complaining that “training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works”
- Partial Victory: Upon weighing all the fair use factors, the Court granted Anthropic’s summary judgment motion for fair use as to the training of LLMs and the digitization (format change) of legally purchased works. The Court, however, denied summary judgment relating to pirated copies and ordered a trial on that issue and any related damages.
- Trial Scheduled: The court wrote that “We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness)” Trial was Scheduled for December, 2025.
- Potential Damages: Depending on how many titles were involved, Anthropic’s potential liability could reach into the billions.
