Bartz v. Anthropic: The Latest Lawsuit in the Fight for Author Copyright Protections and What the Decision Means

Over 300,000 writers brought a federal lawsuit against tech giant and AI juggernaut Anthropic in 2024 stemming from their claims of copyright infringement due to the fact that their works were used to train AI models without their consent and without compensation. That lawsuit has just reached a conclusion that will have implications in the publishing world and beyond for years to come.

The first layer involves the $1.5 billion dollar settlement the federal judge overseeing the case approved to be paid to the authors by Anthropic, in apparent acknowledgement of copyright infringement.

While the sum total of the settlement is inarguably large, the sheer numbers of authors, publishers, and lawyers involved means that the total compensation to individual authors is very small in comparison.

New York Times best-selling author Charles Graeber was one of the plaintiffs in the case. He told NPR that, while he is proud to have fought on behalf of himself and other authors, his compensation will amount to around $3,100 for each of the two books Anthropic used to train its AI tool, Claude. “A lot of travel, a lot of discussion about what to do and how to proceed and a lot of jobs passed up,” he told NPR. “I’m much poorer for this settlement, ironically.”

But what does the settlement actually mean and how will it impact authors going forward?

Well, the terms dictated by the settlement of this lawsuit mean that AI companies like Anthropic can continue to train their models with copyrighted works, as long as they compensate authors and publishers for the use of their IP. It also means that tech companies training their tools with human authored books falls within the fair usage clause of copyright law—meaning, in many cases, authors’ IP can be used without their consent.

“First Flight Books is an author-first model at our core,” says First Flight President and CEO, John Minnec. “We always want to see our authors credited and compensated for their work. So, the acknowledgement of copyright infringement in the settlement is encouraging, of course. But when we think about the broader implications of what these companies are doing by feeding authors’ work into their algorithms without consent, repackaging all of that hard work, effort, and emotion, just to sell it back to us all en masse as some version of progress, it certainly gives us pause.”

There are other concerns at play as we dig a layer deeper. In the same ruling, the federal judge found that AI companies are within their rights to purchase a book, scan it, and then destroy the physical copy of the book and retain the data. The implications for rare and out-of-print books is profound. According to some reports by outlets like 404 Media and Futurism, AI companies are using the ISBN database to purchase print copies of books by the thousands to the millions to scan into their models and then destroy.

Futurism’s Frank Landymore reports that, “according to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to train its AI.”

“First Flight is adamantly and unequivocally opposed to this practice,” says Minnec. “And we want our authors to know that we are not participating and will not knowingly participate in this kind of wholesale pirating and destruction of the works of our authors. It is anathema to who we are.”

It is not hyperbolic to say that the worlds of AI and traditional publishing are colliding in ways that will profoundly impact the literary landscape for years to come, and in ways that we cannot yet fully predict.

“First Flight Books remains deeply committed to the human authors we support and cultivate, and the human readers whose lives are—we hope—positively impacted by the books we publish,” says Minnec. “ At the end of the day, we want to nurture the ancient and intrinsically human art of storytelling, and honor those authors who are brave enough to contribute.”