06/25/2025

Federal Court Rules Copyrighted Books are Fair Use for AI Training

The judge said Anthropic didn’t break the law when it trained its chatbot with them

A federal judge this week ruled that artificial intelligence company Anthropic did not break the law when it used copyrighted books to train its chatbot, Claude, without the consent of the texts' authors or publishers — but he ordered the company to go to trial for allegedly using pirated versions of the books.

The decision, made Monday by Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, represents a win for AI companies, which have battled copyright lawsuits from writers and news organizations for using their work to train artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

Alsup said Anthropic's use of the books to train its large language models, was like an aspiring writer who reads copyrighted texts "not to race ahead and replicate or supplant" those works, "but to turn a hard corner and create something different."

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.