Yesterday, six authors filed individual copyright infringement lawsuits in the Northern District of California against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity AI. They allege these companies used books copied from pirate libraries—such as LibGen, Z-Library, and OceanofPDF—to train their large language models without permission, licensing, or compensation. Among the authors is two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Carreyrou, who, along with the others, opted out of the proposed $1. 5 billion settlement announced in September against Anthropic. They argue that high-quality books represent the "gold standard" of training data and that the AI firms have exploited these works to build systems now valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. Although the lawsuits center on copyright infringement, they emphasize the use of pirated ebooks, the issue Judge William Alsup ruled should be remedied in the Anthropic case, despite his finding that AI training itself was fair use. The proposed settlement offers $3, 000 to authors and/or publishers, which the plaintiffs deem inadequate—just 2% of the Copyright Act’s statutory maximum of $150, 000 per willfully infringed work. The suits seek $150, 000 in statutory damages for each work against each defendant, totaling $900, 000 per work. The plaintiffs include Carreyrou (author of *Bad Blood*), Lisa Barretta (11 books on spirituality, tattoos, psychic development), Philip Shishkin (*Restless Valley* on Central Asian politics), Jane Adams (psychologist with eight nonfiction books), Matthew Sack (IT professional, author of *Pro Website Development and Operations*), and Michael Kochin (political science professor and author of *Five Chapters on Rhetoric*). Earlier this fall, the website ClaimsHero launched, aiming to encourage authors to opt out of the Anthropic settlement and join new lawsuits. Authors have until January 16 to opt out, though Judge Alsup has strongly opposed ClaimsHero’s approach. In a November 13 hearing, he called ClaimsHero’s claims “a fraud of immense proportions” and ordered changes to the website for misleading communication, noting the company’s lack of litigation experience. Plaintiffs asked for an order to prevent ClaimsHero from soliciting opt-outs.

ClaimsHero, which calls itself a licensed Arizona law firm and consumer justice platform, collaborates with two external law firms—Stris & Maher LLP and Freedman Normand Friedland LLP—which filed Monday’s lawsuit. Plaintiffs’ attorneys told *Publishers Weekly* (via an outside PR firm) that the suit is not a class action but a collective filing where each author seeks an individual jury trial for their respective works. They cited prior success with a similar approach in *Henry et al. v. Brown University et al. *, an antitrust case over tuition price-fixing. While costly, the attorneys are fronting all fees in exchange for a 35% contingency fee. *Publishers Weekly* reached out to several defendants but received no responses. Bloomberg reported xAI (Elon Musk’s AI company) dismissed the allegations as “Legacy Media Lies, ” and Perplexity’s communications head denied that the company indexes books. No preliminary court hearing date has been set as of Tuesday afternoon. This report has been updated with additional information and context.