Bartz v. Anthropic Settlement: What Authors Need to Know Share on Twitter (opens in a new tab) on Facebook (opens in a new tab) on Linkedin (opens in a new tab) via email Updated October 2, 2025 IMPORTANT: The Works List Is Now Live on the Settlement Website The searchable Works List and Claim Forms are now available at www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com. Find more info here and below. Background Next Steps Payment Amount and Allocation Default Splits Questions on How to Complete the Claims Form The “Works List” Settlement Fund Key Deadlines Webinar Resources FAQs Background Bartz v. Anthropic is one of the major copyright lawsuits brought by authors against an AI company for using books without permission to train large language models. It was filed by nonfiction authors Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse) and Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief) and thriller author Andrea Bartz (We Were Never Here). In June 2025, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled on summary judgment that using books without permission to train AI was fair use if they were acquired legally, but he denied Anthropic’s request for summary judgment related to piracy—finding that the piracy was not fair use. Judge Alsup scheduled a trial to determine Anthropic’s potential liability for piracy for December 1, 2025. In July, the court certified a class of all rightsholders of books Anthropic acquired from LibGen and PiLiMi, provided the books were registered with the U.S. Copyright Office in a timely manner and have ISBN or ASIN numbers. Judge Alsup certified the class only for piracy, not the act of AI training, and as such the fair use ruling on training applies only with respect to the three named plaintiffs, not the certified class authors and publishers. The proposed settlement agreement came after an arms-length mediation with a neutral third-party mediator. The settlement agreement was preliminarily approved by Judge Alsup on September 25, 2025. Next Steps Search Your Books and File a Claim Step 1: Search the Works List The settlement website now has a searchable Works List available. Visit www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com and search for your titles. Note: Only books that are on the Works List are covered by the settlement. Step 2: Complete the Claim Form If any of your books appear on the Works List, you can submit a Claim Form. This can be done on the website or, once you receive an official notice in the mail on or around November 24, 2025, by filing the paper form in accordance with the accompanying instructions. The Claim Form is an essential, court-supervised step in the settlement process. It’s how you officially: Request payment for any book on the Works List Confirm your identity and titles Select your payment method (ACH, Zelle, or check) Identify other rightsholders (e.g., publisher, co-authors) Indicate if you are the sole rights holder because you self-published or rights reverted back from the publisher Accept the default split with the publisher for trade and university press books or elect to provide an alternative (see below for explanation of default splits) The Claim Form is designed to be straightforward and allows you to claim multiple titles in one submission. While you should receive an official notice in the mail on or around November 24, 2025, you do not need to wait for it and can file a claim online. Please take your time in completing the form to ensure it is properly done. The Guild will step by step directions for the online form. The deadline to file a claim is March 23, 2026. Step 3: Opt Out (If Desired) The Claim Form also gives you an opportunity to “opt out” of the settlement altogether, which means rejecting any award and preserving your claims against Anthropic. The opt-out window runs until January 7, 2026 (104 days after preliminary approval). If you later change your mind, you may request re-inclusion through March 2, 2026 (three weeks before the claims deadline), and the work will be returned to the class. Important Notes Only rights holders of books on the list (current publishers, authors, or their heirs) of books on the Works List should file claims. Please do NOT fill out a claim form unless you find your book on the Works List or receive an official notice. You can file now without waiting for notice if you find your work on the Works List. If you submit a Claim Form online, there is no need to resubmit the form after you receive a formal notice. You may also file your Claim Form by mail, fax, or email using the instructions provided in the notice. Be sure to file before the deadline of March 23, 2026. Notices from the Settlement Administrator If your work is on the Works List, you should receive a notice by mail and/or email, but you don’t need to wait for the notice to submit a Claim Form online if you find your work on the Works List. A unique ID will be sent to you along with the notice (by email or mail). You can wait until you receive the notice to file your claim. Or you can file the claim now without a unique ID by clicking “I don’t have a unique ID.” Your claim will still be received and processed. Notices will be sent to all class members by the Settlement Administrator. The Administrator already has and is continuing to collect contact information from public sources, submissions to the class action website, the Authors Guild and other author organizations, and major publishers, who will also be providing author contact details to help expand outreach. You should ensure that the settlement administrator has your current contact information, if you have not done so already, by entering it on the settlement website. Timeline for Direct Notices: Major publishers will provide additional author contact information to the Settlement Administrator by November 10, 2025. Within fourteen days of receiving that data—on or around November 24, 2025 (the “Notice End Date”)—the Administrator will send direct notice by mail and email to authors and publishers on the class list. Critical: File Your Own Claim While the settlement agreement does make some accommodation for traditionally published authors who fail to file claims but whose publishers file claims, filing a Claim Form yourself is the only way to ensure that you will receive the amounts you are entitled to. If no claim is submitted by the author, their heirs, or publisher for a title, then you will waive your claims against Anthropic, and will neither receive the funds nor be entitled to sue Anthropic separately. If you want to be able to sue Anthropic separately, you must opt out. Payment Amount and Allocation The $1.5 billion award will be split among the rightsholders—which includes both authors and publishers—of all of the books included in the class after administration fees, lawyers’ fees, and expenses are paid. Each title will be paid an equal amount. The settlement agreement discloses that approximately 500,000 titles out of the 7 million copies of books that Anthropic reportedly downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi meet the definition required to be part of the class after accounting for duplicates and non-eligible works. That means that rightsholders can expect at least $3,000 per title (less costs and fees), which will be shared among the rightsholders for that title (if there is more than one rightsholder). However, that amount could increase depending on factors, such as the number of Class Works for which a valid claim is submitted and the interest earned by the Settlement Fund. If there is a current publisher(s) (which still possesses an exclusive license), the author(s) will split the $3000 with the publisher. Any co-authors will share the author portion and, if there are multiple publishers (e.g., different publishers have exclusive rights to different formats), they will share the publisher portion. Assume that the co-authors and co-publishers will share the portion equally unless their contracts provide otherwise. The standard default split between publishers and authors of noneducational texts is 50/50, as described below. Authors who are the sole rightsholder in a work—such as self-published authors and authors whose rights have reverted or where the contracts have otherwise terminated—will receive the full award amount. Default Splits The Claim Form provides for a default split for trade and university press contracts of 50/50 as between publishers and authors. This default is meant to reflect the contractual norms in the industry but allows those with different terms in their contracts to negotiate other splits with their publisher, based on contractual terms. If the default is chosen by both the author and publisher, then it will be applied without having to present the underlying contract. The goal of the default option is to make the claims process speedy and efficient. In cases where there is no default, such as for educational texts or if either the author or publisher elects in the claim form not to use the default, then the author should indicate what default they do think (have a good faith belief) is correct and why. If the publisher and author cannot agree on the split based on the contract, it will go to a special master who will adjudicate the split. Primary Default: 50/50 Split The primary default is a 50/50 division of the approximately $3,000-per-work award between the author side and the publisher side. This applies to all trade and university press titles, but not to educational texts, namely textbooks and professional books published by the educational publishers. If there are multiple authors or publishers, the co-authors or co-publishers split their portion. (i.e., if the author share is $1,500 and there are two authors, each will receive $750). Deviating from the Default Any claimant may deviate from the default on the Claim Form by checking a box and indicating an alternative split that mirrors their contract (they may be asked for the contract or other basic supporting details). Textbook/Educational Authors Default splits are not provided for works published by educational publishers, since there are no standard splits for infringement proceeds in most of those contracts. Splits for those works will instead be determined by any applicable terms in the contracts with the claimants making a good-faith representation of the splits. For more information on how to complete a claim for educational texts, visit the Textbook and Academic Authors Association. Sole Owners If the author is the sole owner (e.g., rights reverted, self-published, or work-for-hire) they should indicate this in the claim form and will be entitled to 100 percent of the approximately $3000 settlement award. There is a separate check box for those who are sole owners; be sure to check it. Questions on How to Complete the Claims Form The settlement website has an FAQ that answers many common questions. The Authors Guild also has an FAQ, which continues to be updated. We will assist any member with questions about how to complete the forms. Requests for assistance can be made through the legal request form. The “Works List”: What Books Are Included? All books eligible for the settlement award should be listed in the Works List. The Works List is limited to those books that meet all of the conditions of the certified class of rightsowners of books that meet this definition: “Book” refers to any work possessing an ISBN or ASIN that was registered with the United States Copyright Office within five years of the work’s publication, and which was registered with the United States Copyright Office before being downloaded by Anthropic, or within three months of publication. In sum, the work must have been: Registered within 3 months of its first publication (in any format) OR before the titles were downloaded (because the Copyright Act provides statutory (court-set) damages only if one of the two is true), AND Registered within 5 years of first publication (because the Copyright Act provides a presumption of validity of all the facts in the registration certificate, such as author and owner, for works registered within 5 years). In other words: The work must have been registered within 3 months of publication, OR It must have been registered within 5 years of publication and before the download date of August 10, 2022. Why are Publishers Included Too? Publishers are included in the class along with authors. In his class certification order, Judge Alsup included in the class “All beneficial or legal copyright owners of the exclusive right to reproduce copies of any book in the versions of LibGen or PiLiMi downloaded by Anthropic.” Note that under copyright law, when the author grants the publisher an exclusive license to publish the book in exchange for percentage royalties, the publisher is deemed the legal owner of the publication rights granted to it, and the author is deemed the “beneficial” owner of that right. This is also true if the author assigns the entire copyright to the publisher such that the publisher is the full copyright owner, but the author is still entitled to royalties, license fees and other benefits from exploitation of the work. However, if the book has gone out of print and the rights have reverted to the author or the license terminates, the author becomes the legal owner again. What If My Book Isn’t on the Works List? If you don’t find your books on the Works list, they are not included in the settlement. The court ordered the list to be finalized by the parties by September 15 and is not allowing it to be kept open, so it is unlikely that works not already on the list will be added. The reasons a book would not be included in Works List are: Your book was not downloaded by Anthropic from LibGen or PiLiMi. Anthropic downloaded from LibGen in June 2021 and in July 2022 from PiLiMi (the books they did not already have from Libgen). If you found your books on LibGen through The Atlantic website, that just means it was on Libgen at the time the data was downloaded in 2025; it does not mean it was on LibGen in June of 2021 and even if it was, that it was downloaded by Anthropic; Your book was not published with an ISBN or ASIN; or Your book was not registered with the Copyright Office (1) within five years of publication and (2) either before Anthropic downloaded it or within three months of publication. While mistakes in the class list are highly unlikely given the rigorous approach taken in its compilation, if none of the above conditions are true, you may write to the Settlement Administrator at the address listed on the Settlement website for further explanation. Check Whether Your Book Was Registered with the Copyright Office Start by searching the U.S. Copyright Office public catalog. But keep in mind these common reasons you might not find a registration even if one exists: Spelling issues: The author’s name or title may be misspelled or abbreviated in the Copyright Office database. Variations in names: The book may be registered under a different name (e.g., publisher’s name, pen name, or co-author’s name). Different title: Registrations sometimes use a working title, series title, or alternate title. Date ranges: Make sure you expand the date search if you’re unsure when the book was registered. Data entry quirks: Older registrations may not be digitized or may appear in formats that don’t match modern search expectations. Use the advanced search function and try out different combinations of search. If you still cannot locate a registration: Review your publishing contract to see if the publisher was responsible for registering the copyright. If the publisher agreed to register, contact them and ask for confirmation and a copy of the registration certificate. If neither you nor your publisher registered the book, your book will not be added to the class. However, if your contract stipulates that your publisher will register copyright in your name—and the publisher failed to do so—then you may have a breach of contract claim against the publisher. We are grateful that Macmillan has stepped up and offered to make authors whole for the lost settlement award as a result of the publisher’s failure to register copyright, and we hope that other publishers will follow suit. We are working on getting more information on books that were rejected due to publishers’ failure to register copyright. Settlement Fund Anthropic’s funding of the settlement proceeds is scheduled in four installments: $300 million by October 2, 2025 (within a week of preliminary approval) $300 million within a week of final approval $450 million by September 25, 2026 (within 12 months of preliminary approval, subject to financing) $450 million by September 25, 2027 (within 24 months of preliminary approval, or sooner if specified funding milestones are met) Anthropic may choose to fund in full earlier. Key Deadlines October 2, 2025: Settlement website updated with Works List and Claim Forms ✓ COMPLETE November 10, 2025: Major publishers provide author contact information to Settlement Administrator November 24, 2025: Direct notice by mail and email completed (Notice End Date) January 7, 2026: Opt-out deadline (104 days after preliminary approval) March 2, 2026: Re-inclusion deadline (for those who opted out but changed their minds) March 23, 2026: Claims Deadline (179 days after preliminary approval) April 22, 2026: Final approval hearing June 11, 2026: Settlement Administrator calculates distributions June 2026 or later: Payment disbursement begins Webinar Resources On Thursday, October 16, 2025, we held a webinar on the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement. Co-lead counsels Rachel Geman of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP, and Rohit Nath of Susman Godfrey LLP discussed what authors should know about their rights and how to prepare and submit claim forms with Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger. The presentation slides and a transcript of the webinar Q&A are below. Webinar Slides (PDF) Webinar Q&A (PDF) FAQs Click here to read our updated FAQ on the Anthropic settlement.
