On June 23, 2025, the Northern District of California granted Anthropic’s motion for summary judgment that its training of its LLM Claude (and Claude’s predecessors) with plaintiff-authors works was a fair use.    Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, Case No. 24-cv-5417, Doc, 231 (N.D. Cal. June 23, 2025).  Specifically, Judge Alsup found that the use of plaintiffs’ books to train Claude and its precursors was “exceedingly” or “spectacularly” transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act.   The court also held that the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies.  However, the court held that Anthropic had no right to use pirated materials (e.g. materials from pirated sources like Library Genesis and Books), and the creation of a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic’s piracy.  Two days later, in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (Judge Chhabria, June 25, 2025), the court reached a similar determination that the use of copyrighted works is a fair use.

After these decisions, the parties in Anthropic negotiated a settlement of the pirating claims with these key terms:

• Anthropic will pay the Class at least $1.5 billion dollars, plus interest. With around 500,000 works in the Class, this amounts to an estimated gross recovery of $3,000 per Class Work.
• Anthropic will destroy the LibGen and PiLiMi datasets containing pirated works used in LLC training, after the expiration of any litigation preservation or other court orders.
• Anthropic will receive a past release only for conduct up to August 25, 2025, and excluding any claims (past or future) arising out of allegedly infringing outputs from the resulting AI.

Anthropic filed an UNOPPOSED MOTION FOR PRELIMINARY APPROVAL OF CLASS SETTLEMENT on September 5, 2025, and a hearing is scheduled for September 8, 2025. Presumably, Meta’s case will not be far behind.