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. Anthropic, which the Authors Alliance calls the largest copyright settlement involving an AI company, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic could no longer pirate books to create a permanent central library.
While blocking the piracy of work to train AI, Alsup justified the legal acquisition of books to train Claude’s Large Language Models (LLMs) as fair use. He compared AI training to how humans can read, internalize and remember a book’s themes and style. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” he wrote.
