Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled Monday that Anthropic did not violate the Copyright Act by training its large language model (LLM) on copyrighted books so long as those books were legally acquired. This case is one of many filed against artificial intelligence (AI) companies for the way in which their LLMs use copyrighted material. In this case, Alsup ruled that AI companies have the right to train large language models on copyrighted material to produce original content, the same way people do.
Bartz v. Anthropic was filed in August 2024 on behalf of a class of fiction and nonfiction authors, alleging that Anthropic had built its business by "stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books." The authors alleged that Anthropic downloaded known pirated versions of the plaintiffs' works, in violation of the Copyright Act, without compensating them. Central to the plaintiffs' complaint is the claim that Anthropic's "Claude LLMs compromise authors' ability to make a living" by allowing "anyone to generate—automatically and freely (or very cheaply)—texts that writers would otherwise be paid to create and sell."
Alsup agreed with the authors in part. The federal judge concluded in his ruling that Anthropic had freely downloaded over 7 million copies of copyrighted books from pirate sites in addition to purchasing and scanning physical books to amass "a central library 'of all the books in the world'…to train various large language models." Alsup affirmed that "there is no carveout…from the Copyright Act for AI companies," so the use of pirated materials was illegal. However, Alsup held that Anthropic's digital conversion of physical books wasn't a copyright violation because "storage and searchability are not creative properties."
