Judge says firm made ‘fair use’ of literature but storage of pirated books in central library constituted infringement
A US judge has ruled that a tech company’s use of books to train its artificial intelligence system – without permission of the authors – did not breach copyright law.
A federal judge in San Francisco said Anthropic made “fair use” of books by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model (LLM).
Judge William Alsup compared the Anthropic model’s use of books to a “reader aspiring to be a writer” who uses works “not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them” but to “turn a hard corner and create something different”.
Alsup added, however, that Anthropic‘s copying and storage of more than 7m pirated books in a central library infringed the authors’ copyrights and was not fair use – although the company later bought “millions” of print books as well. The judge has ordered a trial in December to determine how much Anthropic owes for the infringement.
