Anthropic wins fair use victory for AI – but still in trouble for stealing books
10 months ago
- #AI
- #Fair Use
- #Legal
- Anthropic won a fair use victory for AI training but faces legal trouble for using pirated books.
- Judge William Alsup ruled that scanned books used internally by Anthropic fall under fair use, but pirated ebooks do not.
- Anthropic downloaded over 7 million pirated books from sources like Books3, LibGen, and PiLiMi for training data.
- By 2024, Anthropic shifted to purchasing and scanning millions of print books to avoid legal issues.
- The judge compared AI training to human learning, arguing that paying for each use of a book in training would be impractical.
- The case highlights the ongoing legal debate over whether using unlicensed data for AI training constitutes fair use.
- Judge Alsup, known for his programming background, previously presided over high-profile tech cases like Oracle v. Google.