Several authors alleged this month that NVIDIA copied their works multiple times to train its language models [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
Shadow library search engine Anna’s Archive posted on Wednesday (January 21, 2026) that it had no direct dealings with Nvidia, after a group of authors alleged in a lawsuit that the chipmaking giant was ready to pirate copyrighted works in order to develop its AI products.
Anna’s Archive calls itself a non-profit that aims to preserve all human knowledge and make it accessible to anyone in the world, doing so by illegally scraping vast troves of data. It makes pirated content like e-books and scientific articles available in the form of download links via partner servers at varying speeds.
Anna’s Archive stated in a Reddit post that it provided its data to anyone who wanted it, and that anyone could torrent its data or pay for higher speed access. The platform also said that while it did not have direct dealings with Nvidia (as was alleged in the lawsuit), it had no objections in coming to an agreement with the company.
Following up on a lawsuit filed in 2024, authors Abdi Nazemian, Brian Keene, Stewart O’Nan, Andre Dubus III, and Susan Orlean alleged that Nvidia copied their works multiple times to train its language models and reached out to Anna’s Archive for data.
“NVIDIA “got the green light” to use Anna’s Archive. NVIDIA did not hesitate in using pirated books from these illicit sources of copyrighted material, regardless of the “risk” or the harm to authors like the Plaintiffs,” the authors claimed in a legal filing dated January 16.
Though not much is known about Anna’s Archive and those running it, the organisation has directly addressed these claims via a Reddit comment by a moderator called “AnnaArchivist”.
“We’ve never dealt with Nvidia directly, so they likely used an intermediate party to avoid legal issues. But if Nvidia were to contact us directly, we’d happily provide them with high speed access in exchange for a donation, same as we do with anyone else. And if we didn’t, they’d just torrent it (perhaps even from your seeding!).,” stated Anna’s Archive.
It added: “If you’re not aligned with the reality that open access to anyone really means anyone (including people you might not like), I’d advise not to participate in this project.”
Late in 2025, Anna’s Archive took responsibility for scraping Spotify and collecting about 300TB in music files and metadata that it claimed it was “backing up”. Early this year, its .org domain appeared to have been taken down.
Published – January 23, 2026 07:59 am IST