- A U.S. federal court ruled that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books for AI training is considered fair use.
- The court found the company violated copyright law by keeping a permanent library of pirated books.
- The decision marks the first major analysis of fair use for AI training in a U.S. court.
- Authors allege Anthropic built a multibillion-dollar business using stolen books to train its AI, Claude.
- Similar legal challenges continue against OpenAI, Meta, and others for using copyrighted content without permission.
A U.S. District Judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books to train its AI models, including Claude, qualifies as fair use under American copyright law. The decision, delivered late Monday, comes in response to a lawsuit filed by several authors who claim their works were used without permission.
Judge William Alsup stated that Anthropic’s AI models do not simply copy or replace the original books but instead produce new, different content. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” Alsup wrote. However, he also found fault with the company’s creation of a large, permanent library containing millions of pirated books, calling it a direct violation of copyright law.
Court documents show that Anthropic downloaded at least seven million pirated books from sources such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Internal communications cited in the case stated that the company intended to avoid time-consuming licensing and build a digital library to keep “all the books in the world” indefinitely. Alsup emphasized, “There is no carveout, however, from the Copyright Act for AI companies,” concluding that keeping a permanent collection of pirated works could harm the publishing market.
The lawsuit was brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who claim Anthropic built its business using their books without consent. The case seeks damages and a permanent order against using pirated materials.
The judge distinguished between copies used directly for AI training, which the court considered fair use, and the storage of pirated books, which will face further legal review. This ruling is the first in the United States to formally examine how fair use applies to AI training with copyrighted texts.
Other companies, such as OpenAI and Meta, are also facing lawsuits for similar practices involving training their AI models on copyrighted works without approval. The OpenAI case and a lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft are still ongoing.
Additionally, Reddit has accused Anthropic of scraping its platform over 100,000 times to train its models, despite claims that the scraping had stopped. The litigation against AI firms over the use of copyrighted content continues to develop in U.S. courts.
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