Anthropic Wins AI Book Copyright Ruling
By Bookum Team, Jun 25, 2025
Excerpt from our Bookum Buzz Weekly Newsletter
We got a lot of book world news this week, so check the footnotes at the end as well (everything from BookCon returning, our friend Danielle Robay hosting HelloSunshine’s Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club, SJM’s licensing deal with IMG, TikTok’s parent company shutting down its publishing company 8th Note Press, and the list goes on!)
AND EVEN STILL, the news that might be most alarming (especially to authors and creators) is that Anthropic (known for its AI model Claude) has actually won (in part) its federal ruling on training AI on books!
Taking a direct quote from the NBC News article:
"A federal judge has sided with Anthropic in a major copyright ruling, declaring that artificial intelligence developers can train models using published books without authors’ consent."
In simple terms: Yes, Anthropic can simply digitize a purchased printed copy of a book under fair use to train their AI models.
However, the ruling also found that they pirated over 7 million downloaded books that did not meet the fair use statute!
A lot of legalese. What does this mean for authors and creators?
If this ruling holds up, AI companies can purchase your book once, train it on their models, and your book will be in their systems.
For creators, this means AI copies could get a transcript of your content, digitize it, and train their models from it.
The creator economy & book publishing world is rapidly changing, and we want to make sure we are keeping our readers informed!
What do you think about all this? Let’s set up a Bookum Nook and discuss!
Sources:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/24/anthropic_book_llm_training_ok/
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/federal-judge-rules-copyrighted-books-are-fair-use-ai-training-rcna214766
