Court Rules Anthropic’s Book Scans Were Fair Use

Anthropic digitized millions of purchased print books to build a searchable AI training library, a move the court deemed transformative and protected under fair use. However, pirated digital book copies used for the same purpose remain legally unresolved. The case highlights critical copyright questions as AI development accelerates.

B. THE COPIES USED TO BUILD A CENTRAL LIBRARY

Recall that Anthropic purchased millions of print books for its central library and pirated millions of digital books for its central library, too. It used specific sets and subsets of books for training specific LLMs. And, it then retained all the copies in its central library for other uses that might arise even after deciding it would not use them to train any LLM (at all or ever again). Anthropic seems to believe that because some of the works it copied were sometimes used in training LLMs, Anthropic ...