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Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

Training Claude on copyrighted books it purchased was fair use, but piracy wasn't, the judge ruled.

Ruling in a closely-watched AI copyright case, Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California analyzed how Anthropic sourced data for model training purposes, including from digital and physical books. Companies like Anthropic require vast amounts of input to develop their large language models, so they've tapped sources from social media posts to videos to books. Last year, a trio of authors sued Anthropic in a class-action lawsuit, saying that the company used pirated versions of their books without permission or compensation to train its large language models.

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