In this case, Bartz v. Anthropic, a collection of authors accused Anthropic of assembling a central library cobbled together from millions of copies of their works, much of which was downloaded free of charge from pirate websites. That practice alone is not ambiguous under the law.
Judge Alsup’s decision makes it clear that while the act of training artificial intelligence on these works is permissible under the current rule of fair use, the story is far from over regarding how that data was acquired and retained. The facts around Anthropic’s stockpile of pirated titles have opened the door to a trial about the damages this practice may have caused.
