Open Lawsuits against AI companies
As of Sept. 16, 2025 there were 48 open lawsuits against nine AI companies, as depicted in Figure 1 below. The Bartz v Anthropic class action lawsuit is the focus of this blog. Facts associated with this historic case came from a variety of sources, including an excellent article by Authors Guild.
A preliminary settlement of historic proportion ($1.5B) has been reached on the piracy aspect between the plaintifs and the defendant. And authors whose books may have been involved have the option to provide information for the claims process.
Figure 1: Open Lawsuits against AI companies.
Image AI-generated, modified in Photoshop.
In June 2025, US District Court Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s training of books without permission or compensation was “exceedingly transformative” and therefore “fair use” if the books were acquired legally. However, he also ruled that training on books that were acquired illegally – 7,000,000+ books in this case – are not “fair use” but are piracy. Anthropic not only trained using these books, it retained copies of them in a central library.
Piracy Trial
Judge Alsup scheduled a class-wide piracy trail for December 2025. That was a first in the current AI lawsuits.
On August 26, 2025 the plaintifs and Anthropic reached a settlement that calls for Anthropic to pay approximately $3,000 for each of the 500,000 books estimated to qualify with the appropriate US Copyright Office registration in the timeframes required for award of statutory damages. That brings the total to $1,500,000,000 ($1.5 billion) if there are 500,000 books that meet the copyright registration criteria. If there are more qualifying books than that, the additional books will receive the same compensation.
Preliminary Settlement
On September 25, 2025 Judge Alsup granted a preliminary approval of the settlement terms based on additional information submitted by both the plaintifs and the defendant. He set Oct. 2, 2025 as the deadline for the creation of a searchable Works list with qualifying titles, a long-form notice, and Claim Form at www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com.
On Oct. 2, 2025 the search mechanism was activated at https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/ to enable authors to determine if any of their books are listed among those pirated by Anthropic. The labeling of how to search is a bit confusing. Click the phrase “Works List” to access the lookup on the website homepage. Searches may be done by ISBN/ASIN, title, author, or publisher. Only pirated works that were registered appropriately with the US Copyright Office and satisfied the date criteria in the class action definition are listed. Works registered more than five years after publication or after Anthropic downloaded them are not eligible to file a claim.
This is the same location to file a claim if your book is on the list. It will be helpful if you find the “Unique ID” for your book provided in the “Works List” citation for you book.
And for more details about the case see the excellent article on Authors Guild.