Anthropic scores a qualified victory in fair use case, but got slapped for using over 7 million pirated copies

One of the most tech-savvy judges in the US has ruled that Anthropic is within its rights to scan purchased books to train its Claude AI model, but that pirating content is legally out of bounds.

In training its model, Anthropic bought millions of books, many second-hand, then cut them up and digitized the content. It also downloaded over 7 million pirated books from Books3 dataset, Library Genesis (Libgen), and the Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi), and that was the sticking point for Judge William Alsup of California's Northern District court.

On Monday, he ruled that simply digitizing a print copy counted as fair use under current US law, as there was no duplication of the copyrighted work since the printed pages were destroyed after they were scanned. However, Anthropic may have to face trial over the use of pirated material.

"As Anthropic trained successive LLMs, it became convinced that ...