September 25, 2025
AAP Applauds Court’s Preliminary Approval of Bartz v. Anthropic Settlement
Today Judge Alsup, of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, granted preliminary approval of the parties’ proposed settlement of certain infringement claims in Bartz v. Anthropic, an agreement that requires Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion dollars to the authors and publishers of nearly half a million books it downloaded from notorious pirate sites to feed AI models. Anthropic, headquartered in San Francisco, California, is currently valued at $183 billion dollars, five times larger than the aggregate revenue of the U.S. publishing market last year.
Statement from AAP President and CEO Maria A. Pallante:
This settlement is a major step in the right direction in holding AI developers accountable for reckless and unabashed infringement. Piracy is an astonishingly poor decision for a tech company, and—as the settlement figure demonstrates—an expensive one. The law should not reward AI companies that profit by stealing.
As it becomes clearer and clearer that one AI company after another has helped itself to the intellectual property of authors and publishers, we hope that courts will recognize that the unlicensed, carte blanche use of copyrighted works for AI training is not transformative and not fair use. Rather, it flies in the face of the Constitutional objectives of copyright law and undermines the full and safe potential of AI for all of us. AI companies have an interest and a responsibility to respect and sustain the very industries they rely on to advance their technology. They have a duty to share the tremendous commercial value they have achieved in no small part from the talents and investments of creators.
Anthropic is hardly a special case when it comes to infringement. Every other major AI developer has trained their models on the backs of authors and publishers, and many have sourced those works from the most notorious infringing sites in the world. This conduct isn’t only an attack on copyright law; it’s an astonishing breach of trust with their AI customers and our future society.
Make no mistake that the court’s preliminary approval of this settlement is a very big deal and cause for celebration in the AI copyright docket. It would not have been possible without the tremendous efforts of publishers and publishers’ coordination counsel, authors and authors’ coordination counsel, and class counsel, all working together in the interests of all class members. We also recognize the bravery of the three original authors in the underlying suit.”
AAP will continue to speak with and be available to counsel on legal and industry questions in this case, and as notice and claims details move forward, we will continue to request and broadly share that information with the publishing community.