Andrea Bartz
Thriller Novelist
Bestselling thriller writer (We Were Never Here) who, as lead plaintiff in Bartz v. Anthropic, forced the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history — $1.5 billion for authors whose books were pirated to train AI.
In her words
I poured so much blood, sweat and tears into the book. And then to know it had been stolen for the express purpose of making a big tech company as rich as possible as quickly as possible was just insulting and infuriating.
We think it’s good, we think it’s fair, we think it’s an important first step in an industry that heretofore has nearly been unregulated and has sort of acted with impunity.
Biography
Andrea Bartz is a Brooklyn-based journalist and thriller novelist from the Milwaukee area. After years in magazine journalism she broke out with the psychological thrillers The Lost Night (2019), The Herd (2020) and We Were Never Here (2021), the last a New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick.
Bartz v. Anthropic
In August 2024, Bartz and nonfiction authors Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed a class action against Anthropic in the Northern District of California, alleging the company had downloaded hundreds of thousands of pirated books from shadow libraries such as Library Genesis to train its Claude models. In June 2025, Judge William Alsup handed down a split landmark ruling: training on lawfully acquired books was “quintessentially transformative” fair use, but building a permanent library of pirated copies was not — sending the piracy claims toward trial.
Rather than face a December trial, Anthropic agreed in September 2025 to pay $1.5 billion — roughly $3,000 per book for about 500,000 pirated works — the largest copyright settlement in American history. Bartz called the deal imperfect but fair, and the The Authors Guild hailed it as the first meaningful accountability for AI training piracy.
I hope this settlement reminds people we don’t have to sit back and let Big Tech cram its products down our throats.
Bartz has since urged readers to prioritize human-made writing, telling interviewers that offloading thinking to generative AI benefits “the big tech companies, not us.” She says she felt “robbed, betrayed, and profoundly violated” on learning her novels were in the pirated training sets — and decided to put her name and face on the fight.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/andrea-bartz