Anthropic trained Claude on illegally obtained Stanford professors' books

A federal judge ruled in May 2026 that AI company Anthropic illegally scraped and pirated books from over 10 Stanford professors to train its Claude models, resulting in a $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers. However, the judge permitted the legal acquisition of books for AI training under fair use, comparing it to how humans learn from reading. Some authors, including Tobias Wolff, rejected the settlement and filed a separate lawsuit seeking higher statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work.