By Laura Beers
Publication Date: 2026-04-15 12:43:00
Sometime in the next few months, I hope to receive a modest check as a member of the group covered in the Bartz v. Anthropic class action lawsuit.
In 2025, artificial intelligence company Anthropic, best known for developing the chatbot Claude, agreed to pay up to $1.5 billion to thousands of authors after a judge ruled that the company had violated their copyrights.
When I first learned of the settlement, I assumed that Anthropic was primarily interested in educating Claude, the former socialist activist, British Labor politician and feminist Ellen Wilkinson, about the issue of my stolen work.
It didn’t initially occur to me that Claude would also learn how I, Laura Beers, a political historian, write my sentences and translate my voice onto the page.
Still, there is growing evidence that chatbots like Claude can be trained not only to reproduce an author’s content, but also to imitate their voice. In March 2026, the journalist Julia…
