Overview
- Federal Judge William Alsup held that training Anthropic’s Claude model on copyrighted books constitutes fair use, noting AI’s learning mirrors human reading
- The ruling exempted lawfully acquired texts but found the use of millions of pirated book copies to be a copyright violation
- A civil trial has been scheduled to quantify damages for unauthorized works, with penalties of up to $150,000 per title
- Anthropic, valued at $61.5 billion and backed by Amazon, said the outcome affirms its responsible innovation approach and industry practices
- A parallel fair use decision for Meta this week signals a growing legal precedent likely to shape how AI firms source training data