Anthropic trained Claude on illegally obtained Stanford professors' books

The Stanford Daily names six professors: Tobias Wolff, Abraham Verghese, Chang-rae Lee, Daniel Mason, Hayagreeva Rao and Myra Strober. Wolff reportedly says ten of his publications were used without permission. Wolff and Chang-rae Lee opted out of the $1.5 billion class settlement and filed a separate suit, Cruz v. Anthropic, seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work. The 2025 Bartz ruling by Judge William Alsup found that training on lawfully acquired books was fair use, but that keeping pirated copies in a permanent central library was not. The settlement covers nearly 500,000 registered works. The professors' claims are allegations that have not been adjudicated, and more than 70 similar suits have been filed against AI companies, including cases from The New York Times and Getty Images. For a team training models, the split matters: training on lawfully acquired data and storing pirated copies carry different legal exposure. Provenance records, including where each dataset came from and whether copies were retained, now matter for fundraising and acquisition diligence.