New York Times-bestselling thriller author Andrea Bartz struggled for years to hone her writing style and gain success in the literary world. So when she found out in 2023 that pirated versions of her books were being fed into AI systems, allowing them to spit out dozens of pages in her prose style in a matter of seconds, “it was like a gut punch,” she says. The New York-based writer fought back by becoming one of the three main plaintiffs (alongside Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson) in a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic that accused the company of using stolen works to train its chatbot Claude. Bartz being alphabetically first of the trio, she “got the privilege and the tax of having my name become shorthand” for the legal precedent. After a judge ruled that Anthropic's down of pirated books was not protected as fair use, the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion, the largest known copyright settlement in history. Authors whose work was stolen would receive $3,000 for each book.
Critics charge that the case didn’t settle larger questions about AI and copyright—only that Anthropic violated the law because the company trained its models on pirated books. Bartz hopes other lawsuits set stronger precedents, but nonetheless views her case as “a crucial victory.”
The author—whose next novel, which she calls a “tech thriller,” is due to be released in May 2027—also hopes the settlement serves as a morale boost for writers and a symbol of defiance. “This makes it clear that it is illegal for big tech companies to download troves of pirated e-books to use however they see fit,” she says. “It is theft, and it sounds pretty obvious, but that had not been established before.”