Authors Alliance

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The Office of Management and Budget’s new proposed rules for the administration of federal grants have caused a storm.

Published on May 29 as the largest rewrite of federal grant rules since the Uniform Guidance was consolidated in 2013, the proposal drew tens of thousands of public comments before the July 13 deadline. This post steps back and addresses a more basic question: is any of this legal, and what happens when OMB is sued?

authorsalliance.org/2026/07/28/wha…

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín has closed the Bartz v. Anthropic case, issuing a 23-page order that grants final approval of the class action settlement, resolves several outstanding administrative details, and rules on attorneys’ fees.

When class members will actually be paid is probably the most pressing question for many authors and publishers covered by the settlement. Under the Settlement Agreement, payments begin one business day after the “Effective Date,” defined as the date on which the time to file or notice an appeal of the Final Judgment expires. The Ninth Circuit generally allows 30 days to appeal. Assuming neither side appeals this order, that means funds should begin going out in a little over a month.

authorsalliance.org/2026/07/21/bar…

In the years following the release of ChatGPT and the AI boom that followed, plagiarism has become one of the most pressing issues in academic spaces—and beyond—as writers use the ever-increasing capacities of AI to create in their stead, parroting AI outputs instead of truly processing and analyzing material. Universities have adjusted plagiarism policies in the face of automated writing. In May 2026, Berkeley Law enacted one of the strictest AI policies to date. This policy functionally bans use of AI in any part of completing course work aside from “identifying sources”.

authorsalliance.org/2026/07/20/pro…

Elsevier is suing Meta over use of copyrighted works for training Meta’s AI models. It has a set of claims very similar to those in Kadrey v. Meta, but with a different purported class that includes authors and publishers who own copyright in academic journal articles and other academic works.

Along with two small updates in this case, we thought that now is a good moment to highlight and revisit some of the challenges of massive, class-action suits such as this to resolve copyright disputes.

authorsalliance.org/2026/07/15/upd…