In the Battle of AI and Copyrights, a Judge Seeks a Tech Lesson

Attorneys for a cutting edge AI startup and authors suing it for copyright violations will appear in San Francisco federal court Thursday for an unusual hearing: an educational crash course for the judge overseeing their case.

Judge William H. Alsup, who has overseen some of Silicon Valley’s biggest legal battles over the last two decades, is tasked with determining whether Anthropic PBC violated copyright law by training its AI chatbot Claude on copyrighted books without the authors’ permission.

But before he dives into the merits, he’s asked the parties to educate him on the technology underlying ...