June 24 (UPI) -- A judge ruled the Anthropic artificial intelligence company didn't violate copyright laws when it used millions of copyrighted books to train its AI.
According to his ruling, U.S. District Judge William Alsup concluded Monday "that the training use was a fair use."
However, that doesn't mean Anthropic is out of the woods legally, as it's still potentially on the hook for allegedly having pirated books.
Alsup wrote in his conclusion that although it was not legally wrong for Anthropic to train its AI with the unlawfully downloaded materials.
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"We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic's central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory," he said.
The owners of Anthropic claimed that they eventually started paying for downloaded books.
"That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages," Alsup wrote.
The case document states that Anthropic offers an AI software service called "Claude," which is able to simulate human writing and reading because it was trained with books and other texts that were taken from a central library of materials gathered by the parent company.
Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson are the plaintiffs in the case, as they wrote books that Anthropic allegedly "copied from pirated and purchased sources." None of the usage was authorized by the authors.
The case further purports that the owners of Anthropic knowingly downloaded at least seven million books, which they knew were pirated copies.
It is unclear when a new trial in regard to the purported purposely downloading of pirated books will take place or if it has yet to be set.
