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Authors Can Sue Anthropic Over Alleged AI Book Piracy, Judge Rules

By  |  July 17, 2025

A federal judge in California has granted class-action status to a lawsuit brought by three authors against artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, potentially allowing writers across the United States to seek damages over claims their copyrighted books were used without consent to train the company’s AI systems.

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    According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled on Thursday that authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson can represent a nationwide class of writers whose works were allegedly pulled from online “pirate libraries”—specifically LibGen and PiLiMi—by Anthropic in 2021 and 2022. These unauthorized downloads were purportedly used to build a massive digital repository of books intended for training its AI model Claude.

    Per Reuters, the court found that Anthropic may have illegally downloaded as many as seven million books from the two piracy websites. If the plaintiffs are successful in proving copyright infringement, the resulting damages could potentially reach into the billions of dollars.

    Judge Alsup rejected Anthropic’s position that identifying all impacted authors and eligible works would be too complex for a class-action suit. Instead, he affirmed that the three authors could adequately represent the broader group of writers whose books were allegedly misappropriated.

    Read more: States Move to Regulate Brain Data Collected by Wearable Consumer Devices

    The case is part of a growing wave of litigation against AI developers by authors, journalists, and content creators, who argue that their intellectual property is being exploited to fuel rapid advances in generative AI without permission or compensation. Similar suits have been filed against tech giants such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms.

    While Anthropic and other AI companies have contended that their use of copyrighted material qualifies as fair use under existing legal standards, Judge Alsup previously ruled in June that even if training on such content were considered transformative, the act of compiling and storing pirated books in a central library still constituted a potential violation of copyright law.

    As of Thursday, representatives for Anthropic have not issued a response to the ruling. The plaintiffs’ attorney also declined to comment, Reuters noted.

    Source: Reuters