Anthropic Scores a Landmark AI Copyright Win--but Will Face Trial Over Piracy Claims

"The training use was a fair use," senior district judge William Alsup wrote in a summary judgement order released late Monday evening. "The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes," Alsup wrote. "Judge Alsup found that training an LLM is transformative use--even when there is significant memorization. He specifically rejected the argument that what humans do when reading and memorizing is different in kind from what computers do when training an LLM." Anthropic is the first artificial intelligence company to win this kind of battle, but the victory comes with a large asterisk attached. While Alsup found that Anthropic's training was fair use, he ruled that the authors could take Anthropic to trial over pirating their works.