A United States federal judge has ruled that the company Anthropic made “fair use” of the books it utilised to train artificial intelligence (AI) tools without the permission of the authors.

The favourable ruling comes at a time when the impacts of AI are being discussed by regulators and policymakers, and the industry is using its political influence to push for a loose regulatory framework.

Recommended Stories

list of 3 itemsend of list

“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs [large language models] trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” US District Judge William Alsup said.

A group of authors had filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that Anthropic’s use of their work to train its chatbot, Claude, without their consent was illegal.

But Alsup said that the AI system had not violated the safeguards in US copyright laws, which are designed for “enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress”.

He accepted Anthropic’s claim that the AI’s output was “exceedingly transformative” and therefore fell under the “fair use” protections.

Alsup, however, did rule that Anthropic’s copying and storage of seven million pirated books in a “central library” infringed author copyrights and did not constitute fair use.

The fair use doctrine, which allows limited use of copyrighted materials for creative purposes, has been employed by tech companies as they create generative AI. Technology developpers often sweeps up large swaths of existing material to train their AI models.

Advertisement

Still, fierce debate continues over whether AI will facilitate greater artistic creativity or allow the mass-production of cheap imitations that render artists obsolete to the benefit of large companies.

The writers who brought the lawsuit — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — alleged that Anthropic’s practices amounted to “large-scale theft”, and that the company had sought to “profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works”.

While Tuesday’s decision was considered a victory for AI developpers, Alsup nevertheless ruled that Anthropic must still go to trial in December over the alleged theft of pirated works.

The judge wrote that the company had “no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library”.