Dr Luke McDonagh was quoted in a recent Fortune Magazine story on the use of copyright works in the training of Artificial Intelligence programs such as Anthropic’s Claude. A recent US summary judgment Bartz v Anthropic PBC, No. 24-cv-05417 (N.D. Cal. June 23, 2025) held that the use of copyright works to train AI models by Anthropic was likely to be ‘transformative’, and therefore a ‘fair use’ under US copyright law.
Nonetheless, the judge left unresolved the issue of how Anthropic acquired and stored the copyright material (millions of books in electronic form). Judge Alsup stated that Anthropic would face a separate trial on the ‘pirated’ copies and that damages would likely result. Dr McDonagh was quoted in the following part of the article:
“The problem is that a lot of these AI companies have scraped piracy sites like LibGen … where books have been uploaded in electronic form, usually PDF, without the permission of the authors, without payment … The judge seems to be suggesting that if you had bought a million books from Amazon in digital form, then you could do the training, and that would be legal, but it’s the downloading from the pirate website that is the problem, because there’s two things, there’s that acquiring of the copy, and then the use of the copy.”
The complete Fortune article is accessible here.