Overview
- The lawsuit, filed on June 17 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, names more than 100 authors and seeks over $75 million for alleged copyright infringement tied to Anthropic’s Claude models.
- Plaintiffs allege Anthropic downloaded more than 500 copyrighted books from shadow libraries and peer-to-peer networks such as Library Genesis and BitTorrent and that the company stored and redistributed those copies.
- Many of the authors in the new suit opted out of the earlier Bartz v. Anthropic settlement that proposed roughly $1.5 billion covering hundreds of thousands of works.
- The complaint seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work while contrasting that demand with the roughly $3,000 per work paid under the prior settlement.
- Legal observers say the case aims to litigate acquisition and redistribution claims separately from fair use and that a ruling allowing those claims to proceed could increase Anthropic’s financial and reputational risk and influence industry training practices.