In a test case for the artificial intelligence industry, a federal judge has ruled that AI company Anthropic didn’t break the law by training its chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books. But the company is still on the hook and could now go to trial over how it acquired those books by downloading them from online “shadow libraries” of pirated copies. U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco said in a ruling filed late Monday that the AI system’s distilling from thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative.”
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