Vivold Consulting

Judge rejects Anthropic bid to appeal copyright ruling, postpone trial

Key Insights

A federal judge denies Anthropic's request to appeal a copyright ruling before a December trial, potentially exposing the company to significant damages for allegedly using pirated books to train its AI model.

Stay Updated

Get the latest insights delivered to your inbox

A federal judge in California has denied Anthropic's request to appeal a copyright ruling ahead of a scheduled trial in December. The ruling could make the AI company liable for billions in damages for allegedly using pirated books to train its chatbot, Claude.

Key developments:

- Class action lawsuit: Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed a lawsuit accusing Anthropic of copyright infringement by storing pirated books in a central library, potentially exceeding permitted AI training use.

- Fair use ruling: Judge William Alsup previously ruled that the company's training constituted fair use but allowed the case to proceed due to the storage of pirated books violating authors' rights.

- Trial schedule: The trial is set for December 1, 2025, and could result in substantial piracy-related damages against Anthropic.

This legal battle highlights the ongoing challenges AI companies face regarding copyright issues, emphasizing the need for clear guidelines and ethical practices in AI training methodologies.

Related Articles

L'Oreal's OpenAI deal puts Maybelline try-on, product discovery, and ChatGPT ads in play

L'Oreal has announced a wide-ranging collaboration with OpenAI, unveiled at VivaTech 2026, that brings Maybelline's virtual makeup try-on directly into ChatGPT via L'Oreal's ModiFace AR technology. The deal spans consumer shopping tools, product discovery for brands like Lancome and Kerastase, advertising pilots (SkinCeuticals, CeraVe, Garnier), and R&D - including using OpenAI's GPT-Rosalind life-sciences model for skin-microbiome research. It lands as OpenAI reports ChatGPT at more than 900 million weekly users.

Sakana's Fugu delivers multi-agent frontier performance through one API - and pitches it as an export-control hedge

Sakana AI has launched Fugu and Fugu Ultra, a multi-agent orchestration system delivered as a single foundation model - Fugu is itself an LLM trained to route tasks across a swappable pool of the world's best models (and recursively to itself) via one OpenAI-compatible API. Sakana says Fugu Ultra matches frontier models like Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos Preview on demanding engineering, science, and reasoning benchmarks, while pitching the approach as an AI-sovereignty hedge: if one provider's access disappears, as with Anthropic's recently export-controlled models, Fugu reroutes around it. It is generally available today through subscription and pay-as-you-go tiers.

HSBC's multi-year Google Cloud deal targets 200+ AI use cases, some worth $100M+ each

HSBC has signed a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud to build and deploy AI across wealth management, financial-crime risk, and internal decision support, using Gemini models and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The bank expects more than 200 AI use cases over two years, with selected ones each potentially returning over US$100 million. It builds on a deep existing base - 600-plus AI use cases and a Google-built financial-crime system screening 1.2 billion transactions a month.