A federal judge ruled for the first time that it was legal for $61.5 billion AI startup, Anthropic, to train its AI model on copyrighted books without compensating or crediting the authors.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco stated in a ruling filed on Monday that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted, published books to train its AI model was “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “exceedingly transformative.” Alsup compared the situation to a human reader learning how to be a writer by reading books, for the purpose of creating a new work.
“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s [AI] trained upon works not to