Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

Two US district court decisions on LLM training: fair use found in Anthropic and Meta cases, with divergent views on market harm, piracy and licensing

Published on: 07 July 2025

Published by a Law360 reporter

Legal News

Article summary

In landmark rulings in distinct copyright actions lodged by bestselling authors against Anthropic PBC and Meta Platforms, California US District Judges William Alsup and Vince Chhabria each concluded, in their respective cases, that the companies’ large language models (LLMs) are sufficiently transformative to weigh in favour of fair use. Yet the two differed on AI’s capacity to supplant human-made works, reaching opposite views even while both held that Anthropic and Meta fairly used millions of books copied without authorisation to train their respective systems, Claude and Llama. Both firms are alleged to have sourced, at least on some occasions, portions of the millions of books they used from pirating sites. Anthropic must face a trial on those allegations, and the question remains open in Meta’s matter. The court in that case has set a conference for 11 July 2025 to determine how to proceed on that matter. These California opinions mark the first pronouncements from a federal court on whether training AI on copyrighted material is fair, though more are surely to come; they are unlikely to be the final word. The controversy sits at the centre of numerous complaints against AI developers, among them OpenAI, Microsoft Corp and Google...

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