Anthropic Can Train Claude AI on Books It Legally Purchased, US Judge Says

According to a June 23 filing, Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California stated that converting a printed book into a digital file for training an AI model is permitted, provided the company owns the copyright to the book.

He explained that this process is different enough from the book’s original purpose to be considered fair use. However, he made clear that the ruling only applies to books that Anthropic lawfully purchased.

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The case was brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. They accused Anthropic of using large numbers of pirated books to train its Claude AI models.

Alsup described how Anthropic’s team would buy print books, remove the bindings, scan the pages, and then use the text to build its AI system. He said this use was fair because it helped create something new and did not replace the original works.

However, the judge criticized Anthropic for downloading millions of titles from pirate websites. He stated that it is hard to see how that could be justified.

He noted that getting books from illegal sources instead of buying them undermines any claim of fair use. A separate trial will be held to decide how much Anthropic might have to pay for that.

Meanwhile, Disney and Universal have recently taken legal action against Midjourney, an AI image generation company. What happened? Read the full story.