September 5, 2025
Statement on Proposed Settlement of $1.5 Billion in Bartz v. Anthropic Class Action Suit
The Association of American Publishers today issued a statement on the historic, proposed settlement negotiated by class counsel in Bartz v. Anthropic, a suit that was first filed on August 19, 2024, by three authors. The case as filed included broad class action copyright claims against Anthropic relating to hotly debated artificial intelligence issues.
On June 23, 2025, Judge Alsup of the District Court for the Northern District of California issued an order indicating that copyright infringement claims related to Anthropic’s mass copying of books from illegal shadow libraries could move forward to trial. On July 17, he certified the class for these piracy claims, which by class definition includes publishers as well as authors.
On August 25, however, the parties jointly submitted a statement of potential settlement to the court, and today submitted the proposed settlement agreement, which Judge Alsup will consider at a preliminary approval hearing on September 8. Judge Alsup must approve the entire proposed settlement before it can take effect, and additional details of the settlement will be fleshed out under the court’s supervision.
Statement from Maria A. Pallante, President and CEO, Association of American Publishers:
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) endorses the proposed settlement of the Bartz v. Anthropic class action, through which Anthropic will pay at least $1.5 billion to resolve copyright infringement claims regarding its mass piracy of books and destroy works that it torrented or downloaded from the pirated LibGen or PiLiMi datasets. The proposed settlement will drive home the important message to all Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies that copying books from shadow libraries or other pirate sources to use as the building blocks for their businesses has serious consequences.
AAP and publishers across the country have been monitoring the Bartz case carefully since its inception. Following the Court’s class certification on July 17, 2025, we actively engaged through counsel to assist and support this historically large settlement. We know that our counterparts at the Authors Guild have done the same, and we believe that the proposed settlement advances the common goal of publishers and authors to combat piracy.
We look forward to supporting next steps in the weeks ahead.
A detailed Q&A on the proposed settlement can be found here.
The proposed settlement agreement can be found here.
The unopposed motion for preliminary approval of class settlement can be found here.