Summary
A group of book authors, including Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, sued Anthropic PBC alleging the company infringed their copyrights by downloading millions of books from pirate libraries like Library Genesis and using those books to train its Claude large language models without permission. The lawsuit invoked the Copyright Act and fair use doctrine under Section 107. In June 2025, Judge William Alsup issued a split summary judgment ruling holding that Anthropic's use of lawfully acquired books for AI training constituted fair use as "quintessentially transformative," but that downloading and retaining pirated copies for a permanent digital library did not qualify as fair use and constituted infringement; the court then certified a class potentially encompassing
Case details
- Court
- NDCA
- Docket number
- 3:24-cv-05417
- Filed
- Aug 19, 2024
- Status
- Active
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