🚨BREAKING: A LANDMARK JUDGEMENT FOR THE AI INDUSTRY.

US Federal Judge ruled Anthropic may train its AI on published books without authors’ permission.

This is the first court endorsement of fair use protecting AI firms when they use copyrighted texts to train LLMs.

AI may study what it buys, not what it grabs from pirate sites.

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"First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic
from this use (Opp. 16). But Authors cannot rightly exclude anyone from using their works for training or learning as such. Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts. They may need
to pay for getting their hands on a text in the first instance. But to make anyone pay specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory,
each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable.

For centuries, we have read and re-read books. We have admired, memorized, and internalized their sweeping themes, their substantive points, and their stylistic solutions to recurring writing
problems."

The court file is such an interesting read.

🧵 Read on 👇

⚙️ Two distinct uses

The order splits Anthropic’s conduct into two buckets: training copies that feed the model, and library copies parked for any future purpose.

Anthropic said everything was “for training,” yet the court saw a second, non-transformative goal: building a permanent research library.

🤖 Training wins fair-use protection

Using complete books to map token relationships is “spectacularly transformative.” No verbatim outputs reach users, and the system’s purpose—generating fresh text—is orthogonal to selling the originals.

That satisfies factor 1 and, with no market substitution, factor 4 as well.