Amidst all the chaos of life and the debate on the power of AI, there is an extra bonanza season for AI companies: their combined global revenue reached $229 billion by August 2026, tripling in a year, with the potential to disrupt $4.7 trillion of the profits of global businesses by 2035. There are also unfounded doomsday predictions that AI can kill people due to careless automation and misalignment of programmes. It reveals about the part of the propaganda to promote the AI. Yet something more sinister is going on, something more worrying than the profit-and-loss calculations of AI and its potentials and threats.
I received an email on 29 April 2026 regarding the Anthropic Copyright Settlement in the case between Bartz, et al. v. Anthropic PBC, 3:24-cv-05417. The email says that Anthropic (the AI giant) used one of my books for its AI language modelling without my permission or the permission of the publisher of my book. The email also asks whether I wish to join as a Potential Class Member to claim my share of the settlement amount. I checked their website (https://secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup/?_gl=1itdzd8_gcl_auNjgyODgxODk2LjE3ODU0NDczNjI), and I found that Anthropic has not only copied my book but also books of my friends, colleagues, and 500,000 books of fellow writers who are eligible under the settlement to claim around $3,000 per work, prior to the deduction of any costs, fees, and expenses from the Settlement Fund of $1.5 billion, based on the proposed Class Action Settlement between Authors & Publishers and Anthropic PBC in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. Anthropic has downloaded more than 7 million books from shadow libraries like Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) without the permission of their authors and publishers. Anthropic infringed protected copyrights by downloading books from online digital shadow libraries used by millions of researchers across the globe.
These shadow libraries have helped millions to access expensive books that are otherwise not accessible to researchers from working-class backgrounds and beyond across the globe. However, corporate publishers took this issue to court and shut down these shadow libraries in the name of violating intellectual property rights and infringing copyright laws designed to protect the interests of corporate publishers. But when it comes to Anthropic, there was an immediate out-of-court settlement without the knowledge of authors and publishers. It was all settled in court without any involvement of authors and their opinions. There was no debate on plagiarism in the media, no one was imprisoned, and no one was accountable for this illegal act of copying 7 million books for Anthropic’s language modelling. The issue of fair use goes into the dustbin. There were no American copyright laws and intellectual property laws that could protect against this great heist by a giant AI company. No one has taken any moral responsibility. There was no witch hunt against Anthropic the way the racist white media went after Prof. Jason Arday and killed him with their false allegations of plagiarism. Anthropic can manage an out-of-court settlement by paying $1.5 billion American dollars. But when it comes to China and Chinese companies, Anthropic has accused Chinese e-commerce and technology firm Alibaba of illegally extracting its Claude AI model’s capabilities. Such hypocrisy and double standards are beyond the legal, financial, and moral calculations of the court or out of court. Anthropic is demanding that the US Congress penalise Chinese companies to protect US technology from being stolen. The American corporate thief is asking to protect stolen wealth from being stolen and to prevent stealing by another corporate thief.
Such is the situation when it comes to AI companies and their primitive accumulation of wealth by copying the words and thoughts of writers who burn many nights and days to write a book with their labour of love. This is not merely the grand heist of AI companies and their inter-corporate rivalry. What is at stake here is more sinister than stealing books of authors and revenue of corporate publishers.
What Anthropic has done is a conscious strategy of the Silicon snatch, which is robbing not only digital libraries and plundering authors and their works but also creating conditions for the potential shutting down of real libraries. Anthropic is turning stolen goods into the foundation of its profit-making pyramid in the name of building language models and AI training data and language. It is a strategy of enclosure of intellect supported by codes, courts, and capital, which is fundamentally against knowledge production and dissemination for public good. It furthers the consolidation of wealth in the hands of AI companies at the cost of authors and their labour of love. Such digital strategies of AI companies will shut down physical libraries across the globe to ensure the profits of their digital platforms and digital libraries controlled by AI companies.
The silence of the present, without resistance, can destroy our libraries—the depositories of knowledge, the public and private memories of the past and present—thereby depriving future generations of their ability to understand the past and face the challenges of the future. By killing libraries, AI companies are killing the past and future of humanity in terms of knowledge production and dissemination for the public good. Therefore, it is time to protect public libraries both in their physical and digital form and ensure that no one steals authors’ work and their readership. The collective ownership of AI and its knowledge traditions is the only alternative available against the digital robbery of AI companies like Anthropic. It is a collective struggle to ensure knowledge stays as a product of collective experience and enterprise for the greater good of the collective welfare of human beings. The collective foundation of knowledge can’t be privatised for profit. This is simply the greatest corporate heist, which needs to be stopped in defence of the collective foundations of knowledge to empower and emancipate people from the plunderous regimes of AI companies and their digital planforms.
