The Stanford Daily reported Oct. 27 that work by more than 10 Stanford professors was among the books San Francisco-based Anthropic downloaded from pirate "shadow libraries" and used to train its Claude models. The authors named include Tobias Wolff, Abraham Verghese, Chang-rae Lee, Daniel Mason, Hayagreeva Rao and Myra Strober.
The background
In Bartz v. Anthropic, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that training Claude on lawfully bought books was fair use. Keeping pirated books in a permanent central library was not. The case ended in a $1.5 billion settlement covering nearly 500,000 works, which the Daily says works out to about $3,000 per work.
The opt-outs
Some authors decided that wasn't enough. In May 2026, 28 authors who opted out of the Bartz class filed Cruz v. Anthropic, a non-class suit led by novelist Angie Cruz. Wolff, an emeritus English professor and National Medal of Arts winner, is among them. The suit asks for a jury trial on statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work and a permanent injunction against Claude models trained on their books. According to the Daily, ten of Wolff's books were used without permission.
"They're using my work without paying for it," Wolff told the Daily. Stanford Law professor Paul Goldstein, a plaintiff in the class case, told the paper that the core problem is "transaction costs": AI companies say licensing millions of individual works isn't practical.
The Cruz case remains unresolved.