Background
Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson brought a class-action complaint in 2024 against Anthropic PBC alleging that Anthropic reproduced and used their copyrighted books without authorisation to develop generative-AI systems; the court has since issued substantive orders (including on fair use and class certification) and the matter proceeds under a proposed class settlement framework while final approval remains pending.
AI Interaction
The court’s fair-use order describes Anthropic’s pipeline and training process, noting that from a central library of digitised books the firm “selected various sets and subsets of digitized books to train various large language models under development to power its AI services” (ECF No 231), which places AI-training conduct squarely at issue and signals the court’s willingness to scrutinise dataset provenance and book-corpus use at scale; this is significant as an early federal roadmap on how book-based training is characterised and tested against copyright limits.
Note / Update
Filed 19 August 2024 (ECF No 1); fair-use order issued 23 June 2025 (ECF No 231); class certification order issued 17 July 2025 (ECF No 244); discovery hearing set by order of 17 July 2025 (ECF No 245); settlement preliminarily approved 25 September 2025 with further directions on 7 November 2025 (ECF No 453).