A court split lawful book training from pirated acquisition

The process wall

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, filed 19 August 2024 in the Northern District of California as case 4:24-cv-05417 with cause ‘17:501 Copyright Infringement’ per the docket, concerned books Anthropic used while building Claude. The wall a maker meets in this record is not a single yes-or-no on training, but a court drawing a line between how a copy was obtained and how it was later used.

What the documents show

The Authors Guild's own account of the 26 June 2025 summary-judgment order states that training Claude on books, and digitising purchased print copies for internal storage, were both ruled fair use — regardless of whether a given copy had been bought or found on a piracy site. But the same order found that Anthropic's ‘deliberate downloading and retention of over seven million pirated books in a permanent digital library’ was not fair use, calling that acquisition ‘inherently, irredeemably infringing.’ A settlement followed: the Guild's settlement summary, updated 4 September 2026, states the fund totals ‘$1.5 billion’ across roughly ‘500,000 titles’ drawn from books downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi, with ‘at least $3,000 per title’ before costs and fees, and that the settlement had received preliminary approval as of that update.

Authorship and limitation

The mechanism to name precisely: the ruling did not hold that training itself is always lawful, and it did not hold that AI training on books is always unlawful. It separated the transformative use of a lawfully held copy from the unlawful act of acquiring a copy through piracy, treating only the second as infringing regardless of what was later done with it. The settlement resolves claims tied specifically to that pirated-acquisition conduct, not a general question about training on purchased or licensed text. The Guild disagreed with the fair-use half of the ruling and said publicly it expected the finding to be ‘reversed on appeal’ — its own prediction, not a settled outcome.

What survives

A rightsholder with a plausible claim to an eligible title can, per the Guild's own guidance, expect a notice from the settlement administrator describing that title's claim status; this is an editorial note about process, not a guarantee of payment. More broadly, a maker relying on this case as a template should keep the acquisition question and the training question separate, since collapsing them into one verdict misstates what the order actually found.

• Check the settlement administrator's own notices for a specific title's claim status rather than a summary figure.
• Reread the order's reasoning as applying to lawfully acquired copies, distinct from its finding on pirated ones.
• Track the docket for the outcome of the trial on damages tied to the pirated-copy claims, since that piece was not resolved by the June 2025 order.

As of retrieval the settlement carries preliminary, not final, approval, and the fair-use portion of the ruling remains the Guild's stated target for appeal rather than a closed question.