Two Stanford authors opted out of Anthropic's $1.5 billion deal to sue for up to $150,000 per book

Why two professors left the settlement

The Stanford Daily reports that Wolff and Lee opted out of the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement, which totals $1.5 billion across nearly 500,000 registered works at roughly $3,000 each. In May 2026 they filed their own suit, Cruz v. Anthropic, alleging Anthropic downloaded, reproduced and distributed their books from "shadow libraries" like LibGen and PiLiMi and kept them in a central library.

Cruz seeks up to $150,000 per infringed work. In Bartz, Judge William Alsup had ruled Anthropic could not keep pirated books in a permanent central library, but that training on lawfully acquired books was fair use. More than 70 infringement suits are now pending against AI companies. The article carries no statement from Anthropic.

The thread's first move: where is the Aaron Swartz treatment?

One commenter opened with a comparison:

"Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion primarily because of the theft and storage of the files, but this was somehow a Civil issue..."

The replies mostly rejected the analogy. An ML researcher who says he founded the first open source AI lab wrote that Swartz "broke into a network closet and actively circumvented MAC address bans", which Anthropic did not.

Another commenter added a correction to the folk version of the case:

"The Aaron Swartz case is not an analog of these claims."

He said Swartz was charged over breaking into a wiring closet and circumventing access controls, not over downloading PDFs. A fourth voice drew the intent line, arguing Swartz was pirating papers to redistribute and publicly attacking copyright law, while Anthropic trained privately with a paper trail showing it believed it was within fair use.

Not everyone accepted the distinction

One commenter argued the Swartz prosecution was a fluke driven by a politician's ambition and should not be precedent at all. Others kept the double-standard framing: the rich buy "justice", the rest face it.

The legal question the thread skipped is the one Cruz tests: whether a pirated copy kept in a central library is separate from the fair-use finding on training. Bartz said yes, and the two authors want $150,000 per book for it.