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Anthropic - Multi-Plaintiff Lawsuit for Authors who Opted Out of Class Settlement
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The AI giant - a $350 billion dollar corporation - used these books to train Claude without permission from the copyright holders, and without paying any license fees for the use of the works to train the LLM. The judge in Bartz v. Anthropic held in an interim opinion that downloading books from websites that explicitly consist of pirated books was not subject to Anthropic's fair use defense (and such use by Anthropic potentially infringed copyright in each of those books). Based on that decision, the case settled before trial. The class action settlement resulted in payments of approximately $3,000 per book for the copyright holders of the pirated works that the AI company copied for their central library and separately used to train Claude. For most authors, 50% of the award would go to their publishers unless they had a contract that stated otherwise.
Authors had until February 9, 2026, to opt out of the settlement and reserved the right to bring a separate lawsuit against Anthropic to seek additional compensation for the illegal pirating of their books without permission, and separately for Anthropic’s training of their AI model, which was built to serve as a replacement for those books. The issue of whether and how much AI companies should have to pay to license literary works to separately train their LLMs is an existential threat to the writer community. The range of statutory damages under federal law for an intentional copyright infringement is up to $150,000 per work. The minimum is $200 for innocent infringement and $750 for non-willful infringement. Actual damages do not have to be proven to get an award in this range. Statutory damages serve as punitive damages and attorneys' fees can be awarded if the jury considers the behavior of the copyright infringer - here, Anthropic - to have been particularly egregious, namely willful, reckless or intentional.
Many authors determined that the initial settlement was an insult and decided to opt out of the settlement and join a multi-plaintiff suit being spearheaded by James Bartolomei of the Duncan Firm and Mark Kaufman of Kaufman & Kahn, LLP. The lawyers are handling this matter on a contingency basis, which means that they will cover all litigation costs and will only get compensated if the case is successful. Hrbek Law is providing legal support and consulting based on our expertise in publishing law, and advised many authors who were considering their options with respect to the class action settlement. As the multi-plaintiff case continues, we act as client liaison to the writer plaintiffs with whom our firm has a relationship.
To see if any of your works are covered by the settlement in the Anthropic class action, SEARCH HERE. NOTE that in order to have been eligible for the settlement (and therefore eligible to have opted out of the settlement), the copyright in the affected books had to have been registered with the Library of Congress August 2022 - when the Bartz action was commenced - or earlier.
While the date to join the multi-plaintiff (individual claims) suit has passed, as of March 30th, 2026, if any of your works are on the Works Lookup list, this confirms they were copied and/or trained by Anthropic, and you may want to keep record of this, should any ancillary suits emerge from this present action.
If you have any questions about your options with respect to the class action and/or if you want to learn more about the new Anthropic lawsuit, please don't hesitate to reach out.
