Anthropic has won a major legal victory in a case over whether the artificial intelligence company was justified in hoovering up millions of copyrighted books to train its chatbot.
In a ruling that could set an important precedent for similar disputes, Judge William Alsup of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday said Anthropic’s use of legally purchased books to train its AI model, Claude, did not violate U.S. copyright law.
Anthropic, which was founded by former executives with ChatGPT developer OpenAI, introduced Claude in 2023. Like other generative AI bots, the tool lets users ask natural language questions and then provides neatly summarized answers using AI trained on millions of books, articles and other material.
Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books to train its language learning model, or LLM, was “quintessentially transformative” and did not violate “fair use” doctrine under copyright law.
“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them, but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” his decision states.
By contrast, Alsup also found that Anthropic may have broken the law when it separately downloaded millions of pirated books and said it will face a separate trial in December over this issue.
Court documents revealed that Anthropic employees expressed concern about the legality of using pirate sites to access books. The company later shifted its approach and hired a former Google executive in charge of Google Books, a searchable library of digitized books that successfully weathered years of copyright battles.
Authors had filed suit
Anthropic cheered the ruling.
“We are pleased that the Court recognized that using ‘works to train LLMs (language learning models) was transformative — spectacularly so,” an Anthropic spokesperson told CBS News in an email.
The ruling stems from a case filed last year by three authors in federal court. After Anthropic used copies of their books to train Claude, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued Anthropic for alleged copyright infringement, claiming the company’s practices amounted to “large-scale theft.”
The authors also alleged that Anthropic “seeks to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works.”
CBS News reached out to the authors for comment, but did not hear back from Bartz or Wallace Johnson. Graeber declined to comment.
Other AI companies have also come under fire over the material they use to build their language learning models. The New York Times, for example, sued Open AI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming that the tech companies used millions of its articles to train their automated chatbots.
At the same time, some media companies and publishers are also seeking compensation by licensing their content to companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.
Meta also won a major victory this week after a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit challenging the methods the company used to train its artificial intelligence technology. The case was brought by a group of well-known authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman and writer Jacqueline Woodson, who alleged Meta was “liable for massive copyright infringement” when it used copies of their books to train Meta’s generative AI system Llama.
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