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Judge says Anthropic made fair use of books to train AI

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Fair use is key defense for tech companies in AI copyright

cases

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Judge also says pirating authors' books could not be

justified

By Blake Brittain

June 24 (Reuters) - A federal judge in San Francisco

ruled late on Monday that Anthropic's use of books without

permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal

under U.S. copyright law.

Siding with tech companies on a pivotal question for the AI

industry, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said Anthropic made

"fair use" of books by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and

Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model.

Alsup also said, however, that Anthropic's copying and storage

of more than 7 million pirated books in a "central library"

infringed the authors' copyrights and was not fair use. The

judge has ordered a trial in December to determine how much

Anthropic owes for the infringement.

U.S. copyright law says that willful copyright infringement

can justify statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work.

Spokespeople for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a

request for comment on the ruling on Tuesday.

The writers filed the proposed class action against Anthropic

last year, arguing that the company, which is backed by Amazon ( AMZN )

and Alphabet, used pirated versions of their

books without permission or compensation to teach Claude to

respond to human prompts.

The proposed class action is one of several lawsuits brought

by authors, news outlets and other copyright owners against

companies including OpenAI, Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Meta

Platforms ( META ) over their AI training.

The doctrine of fair use allows the use of copyrighted works

without the copyright owner's permission in some circumstances.

Fair use is a key legal defense for the tech companies, and

Alsup's decision is the first to address it in the context of

generative AI.

AI companies argue their systems make fair use of copyrighted

material to create new, transformative content, and that being

forced to pay copyright holders for their work could hamstring

the burgeoning AI industry.

Anthropic told the court that it made fair use of the books and

that U.S. copyright law "not only allows, but encourages" its AI

training because it promotes human creativity. The company said

its system copied the books to "study Plaintiffs' writing,

extract uncopyrightable information from it, and use what it

learned to create revolutionary technology."

Copyright owners say that AI companies are unlawfully

copying their work to generate competing content that threatens

their livelihoods.

Alsup agreed with Anthropic on Monday that its training was

"exceedingly transformative."

"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 said.

Alsup also said, however, that Anthropic violated the

authors' rights by saving pirated copies of their books as part

of a "central library of all the books in the world" that would

not necessarily be used for AI training.

Anthropic and other prominent AI companies including OpenAI and

Meta Platforms ( META ) have been accused of downloading pirated digital

copies of millions of books to train their systems.

Anthropic had told Alsup in a court filing that the source

of its books was irrelevant to fair use.

"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," Alsup said on Monday.