(24 Jun 2025) A federal judge has sided with Anthropic in an AI copyright case, ruling that training — and only training — its AI models on legally purchased books without authors’ permission is fair use. It’s a first-of-its-kind ruling in favor of the AI industry, but it’s importantly limited specifically to physical books Anthropic purchased and digitized.
Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California also says in his decision that the company must face a separate trial for pirating “millions” of books from the internet. The decision also does not address whether the outputs of an AI model infringe copyrights, which is at issue in other related cases.
“Authors’ complaint is no different than it would be if they complained that training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works,” Judge Alsup writes, adding that the Copyright Act “seeks to advance original works of authorship, not to protect authors against competition.”
The Verge has more here.
