Bartz v. Anthropic PBC

What the court wrote

Verbatim from the court's document (public domain). Ellipses mark omitted text; nothing is paraphrased.

An artificial intelligence firm downloaded for free millions of copyrighted books in 17 digital form from pirate sites on the internet. The firm also purchased copyrighted books 18 (some overlapping with those acquired from the pirate sites), tore off the bindings, scanned 19 every page, and stored them in digitized, searchable files. All the foregoing was done to amass 20 a central library of “all the books in the world” to retain “forever.” From this central library, 21 the AI firm selected various sets and subsets of digitized books to train various large language 22 models under development to power its AI services. Some of these books were written by 23 plaintiff authors, who now sue for copyright infringement. On summary judgment, the issue is 24 the extent to which any of the uses of the works in question qualify as “fair uses” under 25 Section 107 of the Copyright Act. 26 STATEMENT 27 Defendant Anthropic PBC is an AI software firm founded by former OpenAI employees 28 in January 2021. Its core offering is an AI software service called Claude. When a user Case 3:24-cv-05417-WHA Document 231 Filed 06/23/25 Page 2 of 32 1 prompts Claude with text, Claude quickly responds with text — mimicking human reading and 2 writing. Claude can do so because Anthropic trained Claude — or rather trained large 3 language models or LLMs underlying various versions of Claude — using books and other 4 texts selected from a central library Anthropic had assembled.