Anthropic has been sued again by about 100 authors, and CEO Dario Amodei as well as co-founder Benjamin Mann have also been named as individual defendants.

This all traces back to a prior class action lawsuit.

There was previously a class action called Bartz v. Anthropic. The judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of pirated books to train models was not fair use, and the case eventually settled with about $1.5 billion in damages (roughly $3,000 per book on average).
Most authors accepted the settlement, but around 100 authors opted out. On June 17, these authors filed a new lawsuit on their own. They were not satisfied with the settlement amount from the class action. This time, they directly sued Anthropic, and also sued Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann individually.

The claims cover 484 books, with statutory damages potentially up to $150k per book—an implied ceiling of about $72.6 million. If these authors had gone along with the original class settlement, these books would likely have yielded only about $1.45 million.
Anthropic downloaded more than 7 million books from piracy sites such as LibGen and Z-Library using BitTorrent, and using BT means that while you download, you also upload to others—so it’s as if Anthropic’s servers downloaded pirated books while simultaneously helping distribute them. Internally, the rationale was: “We don’t want to deal with the legal and business hassles of buying books.”
Put plainly, they thought purchasing legitimate copies was too much trouble, so they just went straight to the piracy sites and grabbed everything.
Some models distill Claude, and Claude distills pirated books?
The world has finally become one giant distillation machine…