Anthropic Denied Bid to Delay Groundbreaking AI Copyright Trial

A California federal judge staunchly rejected Anthropic PBC’s attempt to cancel a first of its kind trial set for December to determine whether the AI company is liable for billions of dollars in damages for downloading troves of copyrighted books from online pirate libraries.

A stay of authors’ lawsuit against Anthropic is “ill-advised” because the current record fails to answer some of the most fundamental factual points, including why the company retained all copies of the pirated works after it switched to buying and scanning books, Judge William Alsup said in a Monday order. Alsup said the decision is meant to assist the Ninth Circuit in understanding why a stay is unwarranted.

“Anthropic has refused to come clean” about which pirated works it used to train large language models and why it retained them all, he said, and “asks our court of appeals to ignore all these colorations in its piracy.”

The US District Court for the Northern District of California handed Anthropic a partial win in June by ruling that training AI on copyrighted works is fair use, but left the piracy issue to a jury. Anthropic wants the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to review that decision as well as Alsup’s class certification of authors whose books were included in two “shadow” libraries Anthropic used, and sought to pause the case in the meantime.

Allowing an appeal before the record fully develops at trial would enable Anthropic to seek a “sweeping rule” that “an AI company is free to pirate copyrighted materials without ever accounting for the extent to which the pirated materials were ever actually and solely used for a fair use,” according to the order.

Alsup noted that the record shows Anthropic’s built a “research” library of millions of books for purposes other than training LLMs, but that only the training has been found to qualify as fair use.

Although Anthropic claims that damages could “kill the entire company” absent a stay, Alsup said this “doomsday calculation” assumes the company “will lose and lose badly at every trench.”

“If Anthropic loses big it will be because what it did wrong was also big,” he said.

Alsup in May announced that he will likely take inactive status by the end of the year, and Anthropic has accused the judge of rushing the case to trial so he can do so. Alsup rebuffed the claims. “Keeping a case on track is not the same as rushing the case to trial.”

Anthropic is represented by Cooley LLP, Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, Lex Lumina LLP, and Morrison & Foerster LLP. Susman Godfrey LLP, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP, and Cowan Debaets Abrahams & Sheppard LLP represent the authors.

The case is Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, N.D. Cal., No. 24-cv-05417, 8/11/25.