Judge rejects Anthropic bid to appeal copyright ruling, postpone trial

By Blake Brittain

Aug 12 (Reuters) - A federal judge in California has denied a request from Anthropic to immediately appeal a ruling that could place the artificial intelligence company on the hook for billions of dollars in damages for allegedly pirating authors' copyrighted books.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup said on Monday that Anthropic must wait until after a scheduled December jury trial to appeal his decision that the company is not shielded from liability for pirating millions of books to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.

Spokespeople for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision on Tuesday. Attorneys for the authors suing Anthropic declined to comment.

Writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed the class action against Anthropic last year. They argued that the Amazon- and Alphabet-backed company unlawfully used pirated books without permission or compensation to teach Claude to respond to human prompts.

The case is one of several high-stakes lawsuits brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright owners against companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms over their generative AI training.

AI companies argue their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content. Alsup determined in June that Anthropic's training made fair use of authors' work, but said the company still violated their rights by saving pirated copies of books to a "central library" that would not necessarily be used for AI training.

Alsup has set a trial for December 1 to determine how much Anthropic owes in piracy damages, which could total billions of dollars. Anthropic asked Alsup to pause the case and allow the company to appeal his fair use ruling to the 9th Circuit.

Alsup rejected the company's request on Monday and said the 9th Circuit should hear the case after trial so it would "have the benefit of a full record and findings, rather than just the self-serving and sanitized declarations served up by Anthropic."

The case is Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:24-cv-05417.

For the authors: Rachel Geman, Daniel Hutchinson, Reilly Stoler and Jalle Dafa of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein; Justin Nelson, Alejandra Salinas, Rohit Nath and Jordan Connors of Susman Godfrey

For Anthropic: Kathleen Hartnett of Cooley; Daralyn Durie and Whitney O'Byrne of Morrison & Foerster; Douglas Winthrop and Joseph Farris of Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer

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