More than 10 Stanford professors and authors have had their copyrighted works used to train artificial intelligence models without permission, prompting some to pursue legal action against Anthropic, the company behind Claude, according to The Stanford Daily.
In May 2026, English professors Tobias Wolff and Chang-rae Lee joined a separate lawsuit against Anthropic after opting out of a $1.5 billion class-action settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic. The settlement covers nearly 500,000 copyrighted works and has been described by Authors Alliance as the largest copyright settlement involving an AI company.
Federal Judge William Alsup ruled in Bartz that Anthropic could be held liable for pirating books to build a permanent library, while determining that training AI models on legally acquired books qualified as fair use. He compared the process to how people read books, absorb ideas and develop their own writing styles.
Wolff, a professor emeritus of English and National Medal of Arts recipient, said 10 of his publications had been used to train AI without permission. He and 27 other authors have argued that the settlement does not adequately compensate writers or protect their work.
“They’re using my work without paying for it,” Wolff told The Stanford Daily. “As time goes on, they’re going to make the lives of writers very difficult if there’s no fruit to their labor.”
The separate lawsuit, Cruz v. Anthropic, seeks a jury trial and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, compared with approximately $3,000 per work under the class-action settlement. Plaintiffs allege Anthropic downloaded and distributed copyrighted books from online shadow libraries, including LibGen and PiLiMi, and stored pirated copies in a central library.
If successful, the authors could secure an injunction barring Claude training on their works.
Stanford Law professor Paul Goldstein, also involved in the class-action litigation, told The Daily that licensing every copyrighted work used to train AI presents a significant challenge because of the millions of works potentially involved.
Meanwhile, the Authors Guild is pursuing separate litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft and advocating for federal legislation requiring AI companies to license books used in training.
The disputes reflect a broader legal battle involving authors, visual artists and news organizations, including The New York Times and Getty Images, which have filed infringement lawsuits against AI companies.
For Wolff, the stakes extend beyond compensation to the future of writing. He told The Daily he worries about whether younger writers will be able to sustain careers as AI companies increasingly use creative work to develop their products.
