Is it legal to train AI models on copyrighted books? It’s complicated

TechCrunch · 2 months ago · 47

A judge ordered Anthropic to pay a $1.5 billion copyright settlement to writers, but also ruled the company’s AI training was lawful. The ruling penalized only the use of books obtained via illegal shadow libraries, not the act of learning from copyrighted text. Legal questions about whether AI training is “transformative” under fair use—and how copyright law applies to AI training and AI-generated works—continue shifting as more court decisions are issued, with outcomes still unsettled.