A federal judge on Wednesday sided with Facebook parent Meta Platforms in dismissing a copyright infringement lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the company of stealing their works to train its artificial intelligence technology.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup's ruling this week, in a case brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson last year, opens a potential pathway for AI companies to train their large language models on copyrighted works without authors' consent — but only if copies of the works were obtained legally.

Anthropic told the court that it made fair use of the books and that U.S. copyright law “not only allows, but encourages” its AI training because it promotes human creativity.