Judge certifies class against Anthropic for copyright infringement

In a significant legal development, U.S. District Judge William Alsup has certified a class action brought by a group of authors accusing Anthropic of illegally pirating their books to train its AI assistant, Claude. Alsup appointed Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP and Susman Godfrey LLP as lead class counsel.

"The entire class stands aggrieved by defendant's downloading of their books from pirate libraries on the internet. It will be straightforward to prove the class wide wrong done," Alsup wrote in his order.

The ruling comes five weeks after Alsup partially denied Anthropic's motion for summary judgment. He found that authors whose works were downloaded and stored from pirated websites can pursue copyright infringement claims. Anthropic has admitted to downloading the materials but argues it qualifies as fair use.

A trial is scheduled to begin Dec. 1.