Judge rules Anthropic did not violate authors' copyrights with AI book training

Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC's Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025. Anthropic's use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was "fair use" and "transformative," a federal judge ruled late on Monday. Amazon -backed Anthropic's AI training did not violate the authors' copyrights since the large language models "have not reproduced to the public a given work's creative elements, nor even one author's identifiable expressive style," wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup. "The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative," Alsup wrote. "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer." The decision is a significant win for AI companies as legal battles play out over the use and application of copyrighted works in developing and training LLMs. Alsup's ruling begins to establish the legal limits and opportunities for the industry going forward.