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AI and the Fair Use Defense: Lessons from Two Recent Summary Judgment Rulings

By Alex Reese and Thomas J. Pardini
August 31, 2025

Two judges in the Northern District of California recently issued groundbreaking summary judgment rulings regarding whether an artificial intelligence company’s scraping and ingestion of copyrighted works to train its LLMs qualified as fair use. Both decisions carry potentially seismic importance for AI companies and intellectual property litigators.

Overview of the Anthropic and Meta Rulings


The first ruling arose in a proposed class action of book authors who alleged that Anthropic violated their copyrights to build its LLM, Claude. Bartz, et. al. v. Anthropic PBC, Case No. C-24-05417 (N.D. Cal.). The complaint alleges that Anthropic built its library of training materials in part by purchasing copyrighted works in hard copy form, then scanning their pages and storing the digital versions. Anthropic also allegedly downloaded copyrighted works directly from pirate websites and trained Claude on this library of collected works.

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