IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT—N.D. Cal.: Nearly 60 more authors choose to go their own way against Anthropic, (May 18, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

The authors decry the “bargain-basement rates” of a historic 2025 settlement agreement.

Artificial intelligence companies “should not be able to easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates,” a group of authors contend in two new federal lawsuits. The largely matching pair of lawsuits, brought by a total of nearly five dozen writers who opted out of an historic class action settlement against AI developer Anthropic, assert that the settlement was structured to “resolve claims for pennies on the dollar” and therefore elided what should be the true cost of Anthropic’s allegedly “massive willful infringement” (Cruz v. Anthropic PBC, No. 3:26-cv-04482 (N.D. Cal. May 13, 2026)) and Carreyrou v. Anthropic PBC, No. 3:25-cv-10897-TSH (N.D. Cal. Dec. 22, 2025)).

The lawsuits recite by-now largely familiar allegations against Anthropic, the company behind large language model Claude and one of the leading companies in what the complaints describe as “the “generative AI arms race.” As with other leading artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta, the complaints assert, Anthropic trained its large language model on books contained in a series of “shadow” pirate libraries such as Books3, Library Genesis, Z-Library, the Pirate Library Mirror, and Anna’s Archive. The authors contend that Anthropic reproduced their works multiple times during the training process and can also be prompted to recite “lengthy, near-verbatim passages” of those works in response to user queries. The two lawsuits, in addition to direct and contributory infringement allegations, also contend that Anthropic unlawfully stripped copyright management information when uploading works to the training database.

The lawsuits come in the wake of the historic settlement agreement in the Bartz v. Anthropic class action lawsuit. That settlement agreement, described in full in the settlement website, provides approximately $3,000 per work to authors whose intellectual property rights were allegedly infringed by Anthropic. The lawsuit set a deadline of March 30, 2026, for the submission of claims and a February 9, 2026, deadline for authors to opt out of the settlement. All of the authors in these two lawsuits opted out of the Bartz settlement, the complaints recite, out of a “desire to retain full control of their case and avoid having their rights diluted by being swept into sprawling class-action settlements structured to resolve claims for pennies on the dollar.”

The lead plaintiff in the first of the two lawsuits, filed on May 13, is Angie Cruz, a novelist and professor at Columbia University. Authors Sean Arbabi, Martin Atkins, Michael Ault, Jacob Bernstein, Matt Birkbeck, Charles Blackstone, Warren Bobrow, Jim Campbell, Dennis Carstens, Kerry Chance, Sinan Ciddi, Brian Copeland, Aya de Leon, Carolina De Robertis, Jaquira Diaz, Dave Eggers, John Ferejohn, Walter Gmelch, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, Michael Goodrich, Ron Hall, Marla Heller, Daniel James, Lynn Sonberg and Vendela Vida round out the 26 plaintiff authors in that case. A list of works at issue in that lawsuit can be found here.

The lead plaintiff in the second lawsuit, filed is Reese Okyong (R.O.) Kwon, a South Korean and American novelist. Alexander Dreihann-Holenia, Stephanie Griest, Elizabeth Hinton, Brian Jackson, Jason Alan Jankovsky, Branden W. Joseph, Kimberly Kay Hoang, Glenn Kreisberg, Richard Krevolin, Gerald Lamb, Chang-rae Lee, Jeannie Levinson, Steven Lowenthal, Brian Malec, Donna Matney, Ilona McCarty, Tiffany McDaniel, Brian Merchant, Eric L. Muller, Sonia Nazario, Daniel José Older, Laurence Ralph, Lilliam Rivera, Seth A. Roberts, Aida Salazar, Erika L. Sanchez, Jeremy N. Smith, Ramesh Srinivasan, Robert Tannenbaum, Kenneth Warner, and Robert Zimmerman round out the 32 plaintiff authors in that lawsuit. A list of works at issue in that lawsuit can be found here.

The 57 authors in these actions now join six others who have been represented by the same law firm—Stris & Mather LLP—in copyright infringement lawsuits against Anthropic in the Northern District of California. In December 2025, investigative reporter John Carreyrou, joined by writers Lisa Barretta, Philip Shishkin, Jane Adams, Matthew Sacks, and Michael Kochin, sued Anthropic—as well as Google, OpenAI and Meta—for copyright infringement (the works at issue in that lawsuit can be found here.) A motion to dismiss the now-amended complaint is set for hearing next month.

The Case is No. 3:26-cv-04482.

Judge: Keulen, S.

Attorneys: Elizabeth Brannen (Stris & Maher LLP) for Angie Cruz.

Companies: Anthropic PBC

Cases: Copyright CaliforniaNews AINews GCNNews