A federal judge just ruled that Anthropic's AI training on legally purchased books qualifies as fair use, but rejected any defense for 7M pirated copies in its digital library in the company’s class action lawsuit filed by a group of authors.
The judge called AI training "spectacularly" transformative, comparing Claude to aspiring writers learning from established authors rather than copying them.
The authors failed to demonstrate that Claude could generate outputs resembling their original works, weakening core claims about competitive harm.