Kleiner v Adobe Inc: Difference between revisions
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Kleiner v. Adobe Inc.' is a proposed class action lawsuit filed on February 9, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose), alleging that Adobe used unlicensed copies of copyrighted works — including the RedPajama dataset containing the Books3 corpus from the pirate site Bibliotik — to train its SlimLM small language models.[1]
Case Details
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Case Name | Kleiner v. Adobe Inc. |
| Court | U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose) |
| Docket Number | 5:26-cv-01218 |
| Filed | February 9, 2026 |
| Plaintiff | Arthur Kleiner (proposed class representative) |
| Defendant | Adobe Inc. |
| Claims | Direct copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. § 501); DMCA circumvention (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)) |
Allegations
Plaintiff Arthur Kleiner, author of the registered work The Age of Heretics, alleges that Adobe copied, stored, reproduced, and used "cleaned and deduplicated" versions of the RedPajama dataset (which included the Books3 corpus sourced from the pirate site Bibliotik) and Common Crawl to train its SlimLM models.[2]
The complaint highlights the contrast between Adobe's "ethical AI" marketing and its alleged use of "notorious" piracy-tainted data. Specifically, it claims:[2]
- Adobe downloaded and processed unlicensed copyrighted works from RedPajama/Books3 datasets
- The SlimPajama-627B dataset used for training retained pirated books even after "cleaning and deduplication"
- Ongoing infringement from continued possession and commercialization of models trained on pirated works
Procedural Status
As of late April 2026, the case is in its early stages. The summons was returned executed on February 13, 2026, with Adobe's answer due March 6, 2026. No further filings or rulings have been reported. Adobe is expected to seek dismissal arguing fair use or insufficient allegations of specific copying.[2]
Significance
This case is part of the broader wave of AI copyright litigation targeting large language model training practices. It is notable for specifically targeting Adobe's SlimLM models rather than the large frontier models more commonly sued, and for its focus on the RedPajama/Books3 pipeline as a source of pirated training data.[2]
Procedural Updates
On April 22, 2026, Lyon and Kleiner filed their consolidated copyright complaint against Adobe, combining their previously separate claims into a single action. The same week saw the filing of a shareholder derivative action (SEIU Pension Plan Master Trust v. Narayen) against Adobe executives over AI training on copyrighted works.[3]
See Also
- April 22, 2026 — Lyon and Kleiner Consolidate Adobe Copyright Claims
- April 24, 2026 — SEIU Shareholder Derivative Suit v. Adobe Executives
- Kadrey v Meta Platforms Inc
- Bartz v Anthropic PBC
- Carreyrou v Anthropic PBC
- Businessing LLC v Runway AI Inc