Margaret Atwood, James Patterson and thousands of other writers backed a 2023 Authors Guild letter urging major AI companies to get permission to use copyrighted writing, compensate writers for past and ongoing uses, and pay for certain uses in AI-generated output. The letter was an advocacy demand, not a lawsuit or a ruling that any author’s work had been infringed. A later, court-approved Anthropic settlement created a payment process for some authors whose books were covered by a specific class case—but it did not automatically pay every letter signer.
What did the writers ask AI companies to do?
On July 18, 2023, the Authors Guild delivered an open letter to leaders of six companies: OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, IBM and Microsoft. The letter argued that commercial AI systems depended on written works and called for the companies to respect writers’ rights. Its requested remedies went beyond any one lawsuit or payment formula.
The letter’s three central demands were:
- Permission: Obtain authorization before using copyrighted works in generative-AI programs.
- Compensation for use in developing AI: Pay for past and continuing use of writers’ works in AI systems.
- Compensation tied to output: Pay writers for use of their work in AI-generated output, including some uses that might not violate existing copyright law.
The letter also called for credit. It did not set a rate, define a licensing system, or establish that its signers were legally entitled to payment. Read the open letter and the Guild’s announcement.
Who signed, and why did reports give different counts?
The Authors Guild’s later update said that more than 15,000 writers and supporters had signed. That is a later count, not the number necessarily available when the letter first appeared in the news. Contemporary reports published while the list was growing used figures including more than 8,000, 9,000 and 10,000. The Los Angeles Times, for example, reported the 9,000 figure on July 19, 2023. The numbers reflect different reporting dates rather than a single fixed count.
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Prominent names listed by the Guild included Atwood and Patterson, along with Dan Brown, Jennifer Egan, David Baldacci, Michael Chabon, Nora Roberts, Jesmyn Ward, Jodi Picoult, Ron Chernow, Michael Pollan, Suzanne Collins, Jonathan Franzen, Roxane Gay, Celeste Ng, Louise Erdrich, Viet Thanh Nguyen, George Saunders, Min Jin Lee, Andrew Solomon, Rebecca Makkai and Tobias Wolff. They were signatories or endorsers of the letter; that status does not make them plaintiffs in a lawsuit.
The contemporary count and context are covered in the Los Angeles Times report; the Guild’s announcement gives its later total.
Why did the Authors Guild and writers object?
The Guild and signers framed the issue as commercial use of copyrighted writing without consent, credit or compensation. Their concern was not limited to whether a model could reproduce a passage verbatim. They also warned that AI-generated books, journalism and other writing could compete with human creators, put pressure on already-low writing incomes, and imitate distinctive language, stories, styles or ideas.
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Those points were arguments and policy concerns made by the Guild and signers, not findings that every named company had used every signer’s work or that a court had established infringement in each instance. The Guild’s account of the letter and its concerns appears in its 2023 announcement.
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The open letter was a collective appeal to company leaders. It did not file claims in court, determine who owned particular copyrights, or create an entitlement to compensation. A signer, a named plaintiff, a member of a certified class and a claimant under a settlement are different legal categories.
The separate Authors Guild case against OpenAI
The Authors Guild says it and 17 authors filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI on September 19, 2023, alleging that the company infringed fiction writers’ works by using them to train GPT. That case was separate from the letter, had different plaintiffs and claims, and did not automatically include everyone who signed the appeal. The Guild describes the filing in its AI FAQ.
What copyright questions did the letter leave open?
By July 2023, copyright owners were already challenging AI companies in court. The letter did not settle whether copying works to train a model is infringement or fair use. Those legal questions can depend on matters such as how the works were obtained and copied, how a model uses them, what its outputs contain, and whether those outputs affect markets for the originals.
- Training and output are distinct issues. A claim about copying works during model development is not the same as a claim that a particular generated output reproduces protected expression or harms a market.
- Provenance matters. The legal analysis may differ between works lawfully acquired and copies obtained without authorization.
- Ownership matters. Authors may have licensed or transferred some rights to publishers. Who can authorize a use or claim payment can depend on contracts and rights ownership.
Accordingly, the letter’s allegations and policy demands should not be mistaken for a court’s conclusion about all training, all companies or all outputs.
What changed with the 2026 Anthropic settlement?
In July 2026, a court gave final approval to a $1.5 billion settlement in a class case concerning allegations that Anthropic used pirated copies of books. The Authors Guild’s settlement announcement and the settlement administrator provide details. The Associated Press reported an approximate payment of $3,000 per qualifying book, subject to the settlement’s eligibility rules—not $3,000 automatically for each author.
The case and settlement address specific alleged conduct and covered works. They are not a blanket payment to the 2023 letter’s signers, nor a general license covering every book or AI company. The settlement claim deadline was March 30, 2026, according to the administrator.
Why the distinction between training and pirated copies matters
The settlement announcement describes a legal distinction between training on lawfully acquired books, which a court treated as fair use in the case, and the acquisition and retention of millions of pirated books, which gave rise to the settlement. The result does not establish that all AI training on books is lawful or unlawful. Nor should a settlement be read as a universal ruling on all future training or output claims. The Los Angeles Times account reports on the approval and its context.
Nothing in the cited settlement materials establishes that Atwood or Patterson personally received money, or that their books were included among the covered works. Signing the Guild letter alone does not establish eligibility for this or another settlement.
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What remains unsettled for writers and publishers?
The letter’s broader proposals—permission, credit, payment for training uses and payment connected to outputs—are wider than the Anthropic settlement. Questions remain about how licensing might work, how to verify which works were used, what compensation model is appropriate, and how to handle rights divided between authors and publishers. The Guild’s later policy materials support an opt-in collective licensing approach for enrolled works; that is a policy proposal, not a payment mechanism created by the 2023 letter.
For authors, the practical issue is whether their contracts reserve AI-related rights or license them, and who controls the relevant rights in each work. The Authors Guild publishes model AI contract clauses and a contract overview. A contract’s language and the facts of a particular case determine what those resources mean for an individual author.
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