Anthropic is hit with a class-action privacy lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court on Sept. 29. The suit claims the chatbot maker violated Illinois biometric privacy law by demanding government ID and live facial scans.
Illinois law claims
Jose Enrique Oriz Colon, a Chicago resident, filed the complaint on his own behalf and on behalf of other users.
He alleges Anthropic never disclosed in writing how long it would retain biometric data or when it would destroy the records.
Colon says the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act requires clear written notice of data purpose, retention period and destruction policy.
Those disclosures let individuals decide whether to surrender their biometric identifiers.
Anthropic responded Thursday, saying it had received the complaint and was reviewing it.
Colon claims the system locked him out of his account until he completed verification.
He submitted a photo of his driver’s license front and back.
He then positioned his face before an on‑screen camera to capture a live image.
Anthropic ran the data through its verification vendor and confirmed Colon was the person named on the license.
The lawsuit states the law also requires disclosure of the destruction policy.
Those protections let individuals decide whether to surrender their biometric identifiers and know when the holder must permanently destroy them, the suit adds.
Anthropic’s response
Company spokesperson told The Epoch Times the firm takes user privacy seriously and is reviewing the complaint.
Anthropic previously settled a $1.5 billion lawsuit in July after authors alleged the company used pirated books to train its AI model.
The judge noted more than 480,000 books were involved in that claim.
In a separate appeal, a federal court upheld the Pentagon’s decision to bar Claude models from military systems, rejecting Anthropic’s argument that the designation exceeded its authority.
Anthropic lost its bid to overturn the national security supply chain risk designation last week.
