Stanford professors Wolff and Lee filed Cruz v. Anthropic after opting out of $1.5 billion Bartz settlement

What happened

On 27 October 2026, The Stanford Daily reported that Stanford professors Tobias Wolff and Chang-rae Lee opted out of the $1.5 billion Bartz v. Anthropic settlement and, in May 2026, filed a separate non-class lawsuit, Cruz v. Anthropic, over books allegedly used to train Anthropic's Claude models. The Daily reports that Wolff and Lee are seeking a jury trial, full statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, and, if successful, a permanent injunction against training Claude on their works. These are the plaintiffs' claims as reported; no ruling in Cruz is reported in the article.

The allegations

The plaintiffs allege, as in Bartz, that Anthropic illegally downloaded, reproduced and distributed their copyrighted books from "shadow libraries" such as LibGen and PiLiMi, and broke the law by downloading and storing the pirated files in a central library. Anthropic's position on Cruz is not reported in the article. The Daily says 10 of Wolff's publications were used for AI training without permission, and quotes Wolff saying the Bartz settlement, which covered nearly 500,000 registered works at approximately $3,000 per work, still leaves Anthropic free to use authors' literature without paying for it.

The Bartz context, as reported

In Bartz, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic could no longer pirate books to create a permanent central library, while training on lawfully acquired books could qualify as fair use. The Daily quotes Stanford Law professor Paul Goldstein, a plaintiff represented in the class action, on the practical difficulty of licensing millions of works individually. The article also notes the Authors Guild is pursuing other lawsuits, including one against OpenAI and Microsoft, and working with Congress on legislation that would require licensing.