GoKawiilCourt ruling leaves AI book-training legality murky despite Anthropic's $1.5B settlement
A landmark ruling by Judge William Alsup found that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was lawful under fair use, even though the company was penalized $1.5 billion for obtaining those books through pirated shadow libraries. Attorney Cathy Gellis explains that the judge distinguished between illegally acquiring texts and the act of training an AI on them, comparing the latter to a writer studying literature rather than copying it.