Kleiner v. Adobe Inc.

On 9 February 2026, Arthur Kleiner commenced class action proceedings against Adobe Inc. in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging copyright infringement and seeking injunctive relief and damages. The Complaint asserts that Adobe surreptitiously used authors' copyrighted books without consent to train its SlimLM small language models, AI software optimised for document assistance tasks on mobile devices, contending this violates Adobe's own terms of service. According to the pleadings, SlimLM was pretrained on a dataset called "SlimPajama-627B," alleged to derive from the RedPajama dataset containing the Books3 corpus, hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books acquired without authorisation. The Complaint further alleges that Adobe continues to benefit commercially from this infringement through enterprise contracts and deployment of AI software across its product suite.

The Plaintiff, whose registered work "The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change," was allegedly included in the training datasets, seeks to represent a class of similarly situated authors and copyright holders. Adobe has allegedly never compensated authors for downloading, copying, storing, or using their copyrighted works.

The Complaint pre-empts a fair use defence across all four statutory factors: Adobe's use was strictly commercial and non-transformative; the copied works were highly creative and commercially available; entire works were copied without modification; and market displacement is direct, as unlicensed downloading substitutes for legitimate licensing. The Complaint further notes that licensed alternatives existed and Adobe declined to pursue them, undermining any fair use argument at the outset.

The Plaintiff seek class certification, statutory damages for copyright infringement, a declaration of wilful infringement, destruction of all infringing copies, and reasonable attorneys' fees and costs.