Copyright and legal rulings
Bartz v. Anthropic — Summary Judgment (23 June 2025)
Claim
In Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, No. 3:24-cv-05417 (N.D. Cal.), Judge William Alsup ruled — without a full trial — that training AI models on copyrighted books was “exceedingly transformative” and counted as fair use. But he found that Anthropic downloading and keeping pirated copies from illegal book sites (Library Genesis, Pirate Library Mirror) was NOT fair use, and that part went on toward trial. On 26 August 2025, Anthropic filed notice of a proposed settlement covering the whole group of plaintiffs.
Sources
- Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, “Fair Use and AI Training: Two Recent Decisions,” July 2025 ↗
- White & Case, “Two California district judges rule that using books to train AI is fair use,” 9 July 2025 ↗
Referenced in
- Framework §2
- AI-SAF-N Data pillar
- AI-SAF-C Data pillar
- Refining §3.2