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Friday, October 24, 2025

Lawsuit May Affect UC Authors

Received through CUCEA, the systemwide federation of UC emeriti associations:

October 14, 2025

RE: Anthropic class action lawsuit

Dear Colleagues:

A class action lawsuit is pending that may affect many UC emeriti. The CUCEA board wanted to make sure you were aware of this lawsuit and that you alerted your members. Feel free to forward this letter of explanation.

The lawsuit applies particularly to authors of books and revolves about Anthropic’s use of ~500,000 books to train its AI platform (“Claude”). At issue is whether this constituted fair use, piracy, and/or copyright violation. A settlement agreement has been preliminarily approved.

Authors/publishers whose work is covered by the settlement may receive ~$3,000/book.

The link below from the Authors Guild provides helpful information to determine what books are included in the settlement and how to complete a claim.

https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/what-authors-need-to-know-about-the-anthropic-settlement/

Given the enormous productivity of our faculty, I imagine this will be relevant to many of you.

Sincerely,

Joel E. Dimsdale, M.D.

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