Anthropic Sued for Allegedly Pirating Millions of Books to Train Claude AI

Anthropic, the AI firm behind Claude, is facing a lawsuit from authors including Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Johnson. The filing alleges that Anthropic used over 7 million pirated books—sourced from sites like Books3, LibGen, and PiLiMi—to train its large language models. Despite internal concerns over legality, the company built a permanent research library, including scanned physical books, to fuel Claude’s capabilities. The plaintiffs argue their copyrighted works were copied without permission to enhance Claude’s ability to mimic high-quality human writing—contributing to over $1B in revenue for Anthropic.