The court sided with Anthropic

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In the case, publishers claimed that Anthropic infringed copyright by including copyrighted books in its AI training dataset. Some of those books were acquired in physical form and then digitized by Anthropic to make them usable for machine learning.

on this point, holding that the company’s “format-change from print country email list library copies to digital library copies was transformative under fair use factor one” and therefore constituted fair use. It also ruled that using those Email List copies to
train an AI model was a transformative use, again qualifying as fair use under U.S. law.

This part of the ruling strongly echoes previous landmark decisions, especially Authors Guild v. Google, which upheld the legality of digitizing books for search and analysis. The court explicitly cited the Google Books case as supporting precedent.

While we believe the ruling is headed in the right direction—recognizing both format shifting and transformative use—the court factored in destruction of the original physical books as part of the digitization process, a limitation we believe could be harmful if broadly applied to libraries and archives.