TLDR: AI company Anthropic is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging the unauthorized use of millions of pirated books to train its AI models, potentially leading to billions in copyright damages. A federal judge has certified the class action, allowing authors to collectively pursue claims against the company.
Anthropic, a prominent artificial intelligence firm, is embroiled in a significant class-action lawsuit that could result in billions of dollars in copyright damages. The lawsuit, certified by U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco, alleges that Anthropic utilized millions of pirated books to train its AI models, specifically its Claude AI system. This marks a pivotal moment as it is the first time a U.S. court has allowed such a class action to proceed in the context of generative AI training.
The core of the legal challenge revolves around Anthropic’s alleged downloading and storage of an estimated five to seven million books from “pirate libraries” such as LibGen and PiLiMi. While Judge Alsup previously ruled that using copyrighted books for AI model training could be considered “fair use” if the books were lawfully acquired, he drew a clear distinction regarding the wholesale downloading and storage of pirated copies. The judge found that Anthropic’s creation of a “central library of all the books in the world” from these unauthorized sources constituted copyright infringement, independent of whether the books were ultimately used for AI training.
Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Johnson are leading the class action, representing a nationwide group of U.S. writers whose works were allegedly pirated. The plaintiffs contend that their copyrighted materials were copied without permission to enhance Claude’s ability to mimic high-quality human writing, contributing to Anthropic’s reported annual revenue exceeding one billion dollars. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees in January 2021, maintains that it copied the authors’ works solely for the purpose of training its large language models (LLMs).
The potential damages are substantial, with estimates ranging into the billions of dollars, and the statutory maximum potentially stretching into the hundreds of billions. This legal exposure comes at a time when Anthropic was reportedly fundraising at a valuation potentially exceeding $100 billion, nearly double its $61.5 billion valuation in March. The company has raised a total of $17.2 billion to date.
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An Anthropic spokesperson stated that the company is considering options to challenge the ruling, arguing that the court did not adequately account for the difficulty of establishing copyright ownership “millions of times over in a single lawsuit.” This case is one of several high-stakes lawsuits brought by authors, news outlets, and other copyright owners against major AI companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms, concerning the use of copyrighted material in AI training. The outcome of this lawsuit could significantly reshape the landscape of the AI industry and intellectual property rights.
