Judge limits Anthropic book piracy; Stanford authors sue again
Original title: Anthropic trained Claude on illegally obtained Stanford professors' books
Bartz paid about $3,000 per work; Cruz seeks up to $150,000 and an injunction on Claude training.
A federal judge in Bartz v. Anthropic ruled Anthropic could not keep pirating books for a permanent central library, while calling lawful acquisition for training Claude fair use. The $1.5 billion settlement covered authors and publishers of nearly 500,000 registered works. Stanford professors Tobias Wolff and Chang-rae Lee opted out and, with others, filed Cruz v. Anthropic in May 2026 seeking a jury trial and statutory damages.
Unconfirmed: Whether Cruz will win an injunction or full statutory damages is unresolved.
- More than 10 Stanford professors’ works were used to train Claude.
- Wolff says 10 of his publications were used without permission.
- Cruz plaintiffs cite downloads from LibGen and PiLiMi shadow libraries.
- The Authors Guild is also suing OpenAI and Microsoft and seeking a licensing law.
- Over 70 infringement suits against AI companies are mentioned outside these cases.
- Vendors
- Anthropic
- Organizations
- StanfordAuthors GuildAuthors AllianceOpenAIMicrosoft
- AI models
- Claude
From the original article
4 min read at stanforddaily.com
AI giant Anthropic illegally scraped and pirated the work of over 10 Stanford professors to train its Claude models, a federal judge ruled in a May 2026 lawsuit. Anthropic previously trained Claude on illegally obtained texts from professors Tobias Wolff, Abraham Verghese, Chang-Rae Lee, Daniel Mason, Hayagreeva Rao and Myra Strober. In Bartz v.
By car · stanforddaily.com
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