This startup is trying to make peace between AI companies and creatives

In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind…” The words at the beginning of this article are, of course, from A Wrinkle in Time by Medeleine L’Engle. (They’re also wrapped in quotation marks, an indication that they aren’t original to this article.) And yet, the atmospheric and imagination-stimulating power of words can be easily stolen by others. In the age of AI? That’s more front of mind than ever. (And unlike this article, AI wouldn’t use quotation marks to establish differently.) Theft of intellectual property has been a problem probably as long as humans have been creating it, but the ante’s been upped of late due to the rise in a peculiar dynamic. Companies at the forefront of the AI revolution—or, depending on who you are and how you feel, the AI-powered degeneration of creativity and original thought—have been caught feeding unauthorized books and work to AI models. They’re even using the names and works of authors without their consent. In September 2025, Anthropic settled a class-action lawsuit in which the company was using pirated books to train its AI agent Claude; the payment of $1.5 billion amounts to approximately $3,000 for each of the approximately 500,000 books included. In March 2026, journalist Julia Angwin filed a lawsuit against Grammarly (which rebranded its parent company as Superhuman) for mimicking herself and plenty of other creatives as part of its AI tool “Expert Review.” In both cases, the companies in question were accused of abusing the rights of authors. The first lawsuit was resolved in favor of those whose works were stolen, and the second lawsuit is still pending. The problem with what Superhuman (who did not answer Fast Company’s request for comment for this article) and Anthropic did is that they “used these books without permission,” says Trip Adler, founder of Created by Hu