HathiTrust data breach

March 12, 2026

Today, Hathitrust announced that a large portion of their collection has been obtained by and is being made available on a pirate website called Anna’s Archive. 

"As HathiTrust’s host institution, the library has been working directly with leaders at HathiTrust to understand what happened and what we can do to strengthen infrastructure and protocols across all our systems and services to keep the information we are entrusted with from being obtained and used in such a manner again," said Dean of Libraries Lisa Carter.

The library has deposited 4,914,109 items in HathiTrust. Of those items 1,308,601 are included on the pirate website, among them 75,687 copyrighted works. The remainder are public domain or otherwise open.

"As a founding institution and contributing member," Carter said, "the library is deeply committed to the ideals that HathiTrust was built on — trustworthiness, openness, and responsible stewardship in order to provide reliable long-term preservation for digital content — and we take very seriously our responsibility to steward the collections and resources shared with HathiTrust."