Anthropic wins AI training ruling but must answer for book theft
A federal judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books to train its Claude chatbot constitutes fair use under copyright law, delivering a significant victory for the AI industry while ordering the company to face trial over acquiring pirated materials.
US District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco determined that training AI models on copyrighted works was “quintessentially transformative” and legally justified. The ruling dismissed key copyright infringement claims brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who sued Anthropic last year alleging “large-scale theft” of their works.
