Anthropic faces $75M lawsuit for pirating books to train Claude AI

More than 100 authors just filed a lawsuit against Anthropic seeking over $75 million in damages, alleging the AI company pirated their books to train its Claude large language models. The suit, filed on June 17 in a California district court, claims Anthropic downloaded more than 500 copyrighted works from shadow libraries like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror using BitTorrent.

The piracy playbook

The authors behind this new lawsuit opted out of a prior class-action settlement reached in August 2025. That earlier deal, which covered approximately 482,000 pirated works, resulted in a $1.5 billion payout. Quick math puts that at roughly $3,000 per pirated work, which, for context, is less than many authors receive as an advance on a single book.

The original legal saga started in August 2024, when authors Andrea Bartz and others first took Anthropic to court. A June 2025 judicial ruling introduced an important distinction: training AI on legally acquired books qualifies as fair use. Downloading and storing pirated copies of those books does not.

The court found that roughly 7 million pirated books were stored as part of training operations, and the unauthorized copying and centralized storage of that content constitutes copyright infringement. The new lawsuit leans heavily into this framing, focusing on the act of piracy and storage rather than relitigating the fair use question around AI training itself.

Notable authors in the latest suit include Tiffany Aliche and Laura Esquivel. Esquivel wrote “Like Water for Chocolate,” one of the best-selling Mexican novels of all time.

The $1.5 billion precedent and what comes next

With only around 500 works at issue compared to the prior case’s 482,000, the per-work damages sought here are dramatically higher. That suggests these plaintiffs are angling for a ruling that treats individual piracy claims more seriously than the class-action math allowed.

The June 2025 ruling created a legal framework that simultaneously protects AI companies’ ability to train on properly licensed content and punishes them for cutting corners with pirated material. Anthropic has deep partnerships with Microsoft and Amazon, two of the largest cloud and enterprise technology providers on the planet.

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