A federal judge says training AI on copyrighted works is ‘fair use,’ but casts doubt on use of pirated materials

A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted works without specific permission to do so was not a violation of copyright law.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup said that AI company Anthropic could assert a “fair use” defense against copyright claims for training its Claude AI models on copyrighted books. But the judge also ruled that it mattered exactly how those books were obtained.

Alsup supported Anthropic’s claim that it was “fair use” for...