Judge Supports AI Company’s Use of Copyrighted Books.

A US judge has ruled that using books to train artificial intelligence (AI) software does not violate US copyright law.

This decision arose from a lawsuit filed last year by three authors—a novelist and two non-fiction writers—against AI company Anthropic. They accused the firm of using their works without permission to train its Claude AI model and build a multi-billion dollar business.

Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s use of the authors’ books was “exceedingly transformative,” and thus permissible under US law.

However, he denied Anthropic’s motion to dismiss the case, deciding the company must face trial over allegations that it used pirated copies to build its library. Anthropic, supported by Amazon and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), could be liable for up to $150,000 per copyrighted work.

The judge stated that Anthropic’s “central library” contained more than seven million pirated books.

This ruling is one of the first to address a key issue in ongoing legal disputes across the AI industry—how Large Language Models (LLMs) can lawfully learn from existing content.

Judge Alsup wrote, “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained on works not to copy or replace them, but to create something new.”

He added that if the training process required copying material within the LLM, those copies were part of a transformative use.

The judge also noted that the authors did not claim the training produced “infringing knockoffs” or direct replicas for users of Claude. He said if that had happened, “this would be a different case.”

Similar lawsuits have targeted the AI industry’s use of other media, including journalism, music, and video. For example, Disney and Universal recently sued AI image generator Midjourney over piracy claims, and the BBC is considering legal action over unauthorized use of its content.

In response, some AI companies have negotiated licensing agreements with creators or publishers to use original materials legally.

Judge Alsup accepted Anthropic’s “fair use” defense, which could influence future rulings. Nonetheless, he ruled that Anthropic violated authors’ rights by retaining pirated books in a “central library of all the books in the world.”

Anthropic stated it welcomed the judge’s acknowledgment that its use was transformative but disagreed with the trial decision regarding how some books were acquired. The company remains confident and is exploring its options.

A lawyer for the authors declined to comment.

The plaintiffs are Andrea Bartz, a bestselling thriller author known for We Were Never Here and The Last Ferry Out, and non-fiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson.