More than 100 authors have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic seeking over $75 million in damages, alleging the AI company behind Claude pirated their copyrighted books to train its models. The case, filed in mid-June 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, represents a new legal front that focuses not on whether AI training constitutes fair use, but on how the training data was obtained in the first place.
The lawsuit, titled Shakespeare v. Anthropic, is led by British sociologist Thomas William Shakespeare. The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic downloaded their works from sources like LibGen and BitTorrent, essentially shadow libraries and peer-to-peer piracy networks, to build the datasets powering Claude.
From fair use to outright piracy
This lawsuit sidesteps the fair use debate entirely. The plaintiffs aren’t arguing about what Anthropic did with their books after ingesting them. They’re arguing that Anthropic obtained the books through illegal channels. A company can potentially defend AI training under fair use. Defending the acquisition of training materials through piracy networks is a much harder sell in court.
The plaintiffs in this case are primarily authors who opted out of a previous settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic case. That earlier action resulted in a proposed $1.5 billion settlement covering approximately 480,000 works, with preliminary approval granted in 2025. Authors who stayed in that settlement stood to receive roughly $3,000 to $3,100 per work after legal fees, and claims were filed for over 90% of eligible works.
