Over 100 authors sue Anthropic for $75 million
A lawsuit filed June 17 in the Northern District of California alleges that Anthropic used over 500 pirated books to train Claude. The plaintiffs are seeking $150,000 per work.
The group includes Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Zachary Sklar, and Newbery Medalist Donna Barba Higuera. The complaint alleges that Anthropic sourced the books via BitTorrent from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.
These authors opted out of a previous class-action settlement that concluded in September with a $1.5 billion payout, which resulted in roughly $3,000 per work. This new filing distinguishes itself by accusing Anthropic of both unauthorized downloading and distribution. Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.
Up next
pxpipe hides text in PNGs to cut token costs by up to 70%
pxpipe renders system prompts and chat history into PNGs to feed them to Claude Code as images. In a Fable 5 demo, this cut session costs from $42.21 to $6.06. The trick works because images are cheaper than text tokens, though it is lossy and can cause errors with precise data like hashes.
Related stories
- University of Tennessee sues Anthropic over neural network patents
- Judge signs off on Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement
- Judge signs off on Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors
- Elvis Presley rights holders sue Anthropic over 274 songs
- Anthropic asks full D.C. Circuit to rehear Pentagon case
- D.C. Circuit calls Claude’s refusals a supply chain risk
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first.
Join the conversation
Sign in to leave a comment. It appears after moderation.