A federal judge has delivered a landmark ruling in the ongoing legal battle between authors and AI companies over copyright infringement. Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California found that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books to train its Claude AI models constitutes fair use under copyright law.
The case began when authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed a class action lawsuit against Anthropic in August 2024. They alleged that the company copied millions of books without permission to train its large language models.
Judge Alsup’s decision marks the first time a federal court has sided with an AI company on fair use grounds for training purposes. The judge called the AI technology “among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes.” He also ruled that converting purchased print books to digital format was fair use, provided the original copies were destroyed.
However, the ruling was not entirely favorable to Anthropic. The judge found that the company’s use of pirated book copies to build a “central library” was not protected by fair use. Anthropic allegedly downloaded millions of copyrighted books from illegal sources and planned to keep them “forever” for “general purpose” use.
The court will now proceed to trial specifically on the pirated content issue and resulting damages. Judge Alsup noted that purchasing books after downloading them illegally would not absolve Anthropic of liability, though it might affect the damage amount.
Sources: AI Fray, TechCrunch