U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco said in a ruling filed late Monday that the AI system’s distilling from thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative.”

In a groundbreaking legal decision that could redefine the boundaries of copyright law in the age of artificial intelligence, a U.S. federal court has ruled that Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude language model,