AI Is Theft

If capital is rewriting the rules of work with AI, then workers must rewrite the terms of resistance.

When fast-fashionistas scrolling through Shein’s website came across a shirt seemingly modeled by Luigi Mangione, the alleged shooter of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, confusion, outrage, and maybe a little bit of swooning ensued. Mangione’s low-resolution doppelgänger had all the hallmarks of generative artificial intelligence—odd textures, strange lighting, and unnatural fingers. Researchers at BBC Verify found a 99.9 percent similarity between the image and a courtroom photo of Mangione. The clothing company swiftly removed the image, while blaming a third-party vendor and promising tighter oversight. But since we lack control over the ways in which technology is reshaping our world, there’s nothing to guarantee that AI won’t continue to cause such problems.

Shein generated headlines because of the person whose image was being replicated, but the incident is symptomatic of the ongoing datafication of the uncoded world, which echoes past periods of expropriation. Data is produced through human activity and subsequent machine surveillance. These digital hoards become capital as companies build intangible assets, such as the profit-generating AI tools trained on vast quantities of images, text, and data from our digital footprints, often without consent. We lack control over our data and receive no monetary compensation for it.

Recently, however, there have been a growing number of high-profile legal challenges to AI companies, including one case between Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude, and a coalition of authors and publishers. In a June 2025 summary judgment, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that legally acquired books could be used to train AI under “fair use,” and that the “technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes.” However, he also found that Anthropic had knowingly and illegally downloaded millions of pirated ebooks from sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Instead of purchasing the texts, Anthropic chose to “steal” them, exposing itself to damages of up to $150,000 per pirated work.

Anthropic recently agreed to a $1.5 billion copyright settlement—the largest in U.S. history. For half a million authors, the $3,000 payout per book might look like a victory, but for Anthropic, it was simply the cost of doing business. While lawyers dubbed it the “Napster moment” of the AI industry, they seem unaware of the difference between Napster (a peer-to-peer file-sharing net...