Authors vs. AI – Two Key Federal Copyright Decisions

The Northern District of California recently rendered two decisions in rapid succession concerning the legality of using copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence large language models ("LLM"). The decisions touch on issues of fair use and copyright infringement and offer insight into the future of IP litigation and licensing in the AI era.

The first case Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, No. C 24-05417 WHA (N.D. Cal. June 23, 2025), involved a group of authors suing Anthropic (owner of Claude.AI) for copyright infringement, alleging unauthorized use of their works to train Claude's LLM. Anthropic claimed any use of copyrighted materials in the training of Claude was a fair use under U.S. Copyright law. Judge Alsup opined that the training of an AI LLM like Claude using copyrighted works was a "spectacularly transformative" use of such works which would, in essence, constitute a "fair use" under the Copyright Act. The court mentioned that "[a]uthors cannot rightly