https://twitter.com/ednewtonrex/status/1938629250820755491
A federal judge has sided with the AI company Anthropic in a landmark copyright ruling, declaring that artificial intelligence developers can train models using published books without obtaining the authors’ consent. This decision, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, sets a precedent that training AI systems on copyrighted works constitutes fair use. Judge William Alsup’s ruling is the first of its kind in dozens of ongoing copyright lawsuits addressing fair use in the context of generative AI.
If someone tells you that training gen AI on copyrighted work without a license is legal in the US, send them Judge Chhabria’s ruling from yesterday:
“In many circumstances it will be illegal to copy copyright-protected works to train generative AI models without permission.”
— Ed Newton-Rex (@ednewtonrex) June 26, 2025
This issue has been a significant point of contention for creatives across various industries, as generative AI tools have made it easier for users to produce art and other creative works from models trained on copyrighted material, often without the creators’ knowledge or permission. Since 2023, AI companies have faced a growing number of copyright lawsuits from media companies, music labels, and authors. In response, artists have signed open letters urging government officials and AI developers to restrict the unauthorized use of copyrighted works.
Additionally, companies have increasingly entered into licensing agreements with AI developers to set terms for using their artists’ works.
Big news for authors and publishers this week regarding AI https://t.co/XhcQgP9ftg
— matilda battersby (@matildbattersby) June 27, 2025
The lawsuit in question was filed in August by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who claimed that Anthropic ignored copyright protections by pirating millions of books and digitizing purchased books to feed into its large language models, which are used to generate humanlike text responses. Alsup ruled that the copies used to train specific large language models (LLMs) were justified as fair use.
Meta triumphs in copyright ruling
“Every factor but the nature of the copyrighted work favors this result. The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes,” Alsup wrote.
His decision emphasized that Anthropic’s use of the books to train its models, including versions of its flagship AI model Claude, was “exceedingly transformative” enough to qualify as fair use. Fair use, as defined by the Copyright Act, considers four factors: the purpose of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount of the work used, and whether the use impacts the market value of the original work. In a statement, Anthropic said, “We are pleased that the Court recognized that using works to train LLMs was transformative — spectacularly so.
Consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress, 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.”
While Bartz and Johnson did not immediately respond to requests for comment, Graeber declined to comment. Alsup acknowledged that all the authors’ works contained “expressive elements” that earned them stronger copyright protection, which weighed against fair use, but this was not enough to sway the overall ruling. Making digital copies of purchased books was ruled as fair use; however, downloading pirated copies for free was not.
Though Alsup’s ruling supported the AI company’s fair use argument, it stated that Anthropic must still face trial for using pirated copies to build its library. “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft,” Alsup wrote, “but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
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