Judge hands down mixed ruling in Anthropic’s AI copyright case; read the full order here

A federal judge has ruled that Anthropic’s use of a pirate book database infringed copyright, but the use of books obtained legally represented fair use. (Photo: Getty Images for Unsplash+)

June 24, 2025 — In the first significant ruling in a major AI copyright case, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup issued an order on summary judgment in Bartz v. Anthropic, a lawsuit brought by several authors against the AI developer Anthropic.

It’s a mixed decision. Judge Alsup ruled that the data obtained from books pirated in the LibGen database, which Anthropic used to train AI models, infringed on the copyright of the authors. Alsup also ruled that the use of text from books legally obtained by Anthropic—single copies, not licensed for use as training data—represented fair use.

We’ll have a more thorough analysis of the decision later today, once we’ve had a chance to fully digest the ruling. In the meantime, we’re offering a full pdf of the ruling here.

Click on the image above for a full pdf of the ruling.