Federal Judge Rules in Favor of Anthropic in AI Copyright Case

A federal judge has sided with Anthropic in a significant AI copyright case, ruling that the company’s practice of training its AI models on legally purchased books without obtaining authors’ permission constitutes fair use. This ruling marks a first-of-its-kind decision favoring the AI industry, although it is specifically limited to physical books that Anthropic has purchased and digitized.

Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California stated in his decision that Anthropic must still face a separate trial regarding allegations of pirating “millions” of books from the internet. The ruling does not address whether the outputs generated by an AI model infringe on copyrights, a matter that is currently under scrutiny in other related cases.

The lawsuit was initiated by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who claim that Anthropic trained its family of Claude AI models using pirated materials. This pivotal decision could significantly influence how judges approach AI copyright cases in the future.

In his ruling, Judge Alsup examined Anthropic’s method of acquiring print copies of books, removing their bindings, cutting the pages, and scanning them into a centralized digital library for training its AI models. The judge concluded that digitizing a legally purchased physical book is fair use, and that utilizing these digital copies to train a large language model (LLM) is sufficiently transformative to also qualify as fair use.

Judge Alsup remarked, “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.” He emphasized that the Copyright Act aims to promote original works of authorship rather than to shield authors from competition.

Despite these favorable outcomes for Anthropic, Judge Alsup noted that the company’s decision to store millions of pirated book copies in its central library—regardless of whether some were used for training—does not fall under the fair use doctrine. He stated, “This order doubts that any accused infringer could ever meet its burden of explaining why downloading source copies from pirate sites that it could have purchased or otherwise accessed lawfully was itself reasonably necessary to any subsequent fair use,” with emphasis on the necessity of lawful access.

Looking ahead, Judge Alsup indicated that a separate trial will be held to address the pirated content utilized by Anthropic, which will ultimately determine the resulting damages.