Anthropic wins key ruling on AI in authors' copyright lawsuit

By Blake Brittain

June 24 (Reuters) - A federal judge in San Francisco ruled late Monday that Anthropic's use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under U.S. copyright law.

Siding with tech companies on a pivotal question for the AI industry, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said Anthropic made "fair use" of books by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model.

Alsup also said, however, that Anthropic's storage of the authors' pirated books in a "central library" violated their copyrights and was not fair use.