Andrea Bartz

• 1. Introduction

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  Andrea Bartz is an American writer of mystery and thriller novels. Her name now appears in a courtroom fight over how machines learn to write. The case turned on a simple question with a hard answer. Can a company teach its software by feeding it an author's books? Bartz stood at the front of a class of authors who said no. What did they accuse the company of doing? How did a federal court respond? And what did the company finally agree to pay?

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• 2. Lead Plaintiff

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  In August 2024, Bartz joined Kirk Wallace Johnson and Charles Graeber as lead plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. The suit alleged copyright infringement. Its central claim was that the company had trained its large language models on pirated copies of the authors' books.

  On the 23rd of June 2025, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California issued its ruling. The court found that the company's use of digital copies of the plaintiffs' works counted as fair use. That was a setback for the authors on one front.

  The same ruling cut the other way on a second front. The court found that the company had improperly used millions of pirated library copies. That finding kept the case alive and sent it toward a trial on those copies.

  The trial never came. In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle. If the court approves the deal, it would be the largest copyright resolution in United States history. Long before this case, Bartz had earned her public reputation through fiction.

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• 3. Five Novels

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  A debut of sorts arrived in 2019 with The Lost Night, published by Crown. Five novels in total followed between 2019 and 2025. Four of them came from a second publisher, Ballantine Books.

  The Herd appeared from Ballantine Books in 2020. A year later came We Were Never Here, the book that made Bartz a New York Times bestselling author. It is a mystery and thriller novel, and it remains the work most closely tied to her name.

  The Spare Room followed in 2023, again with Ballantine Books. The Last Ferry Out reached readers in 2025, the same year the settlement was announced. Behind this run of books is a writer who started out in the American Midwest.

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• 4. Wisconsin To Brooklyn

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  Bartz was born in Brookfield, Wisconsin. She now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Those two places mark the distance between her beginnings and her working life as a published author. Her sister is Julia Bartz, the one family member the record names.

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