Lawsuit filed against Anthropic for alleged theft of books used to train AI

More than 100 authors have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, seeking damages exceeding $75 million, after accusing the San Francisco-based company of stealing their books and using them to train its artificial intelligence systems.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on June 17, alleges that the company, which has partnerships with Microsoft and Amazon, used more than 500 pirated books to train its models, including Tiffany Aliche’s “The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke” and Mexican author Laura Esquivel’s “Like Water for Chocolate.”

The suit accuses the company of infringing the copyrights of at least 100 authors, including Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari; Oscar-nominated screenwriter Zachary Sklar of the film “JFK”; and Newbery Medal winner Donna Barba Higuera.

According to the complaint, the authors are seeking $150,000 in damages for each pirated work.

The lawsuit also claims that Anthropic used the file-sharing program BitTorrent to access the websites Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, downloading millions of unauthorized copies of books before adding them to what the complaint describes as a “massive central library” that the company relies on to train its AI assistant, Claude.

All the plaintiffs in this case had previously opted out of a prior class-action lawsuit against the company, which concluded in September with a $1.5 billion settlement. In that case, authors including Andrea Bartz, Charles Gribble, and Kirk Wallace Johnson accused the company of using their works to train its large language model, Claude.

Under that settlement, Anthropic agreed to destroy copies downloaded from the books it was accused of pirating, while remaining subject to copyright infringement claims related to the outputs generated by its AI models.

Each author in the previous class-action lawsuit, which involved thousands of writers, received approximately $3,000 for each work taken.

Both the class-action and the individual lawsuits allege that Anthropic appropriated around 7 million creative works without permission.

James Bartolome, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said, “Anthropic has built the future of AI on the backs of authors’ books, whether they are from the past, present, or still living. Our clients are asking a simple question: Is this innovation, or theft well marketed? Let the jury decide.”

Anthropic has not issued any official comment in response to media requests regarding these allegations.