ANJA KARADEGLIJA, The Globe and Mail; Canadian news publishers sue Anthropic for copyright infringement
"A coalition of news publishers that includes Canada’s largest newspapers is suing the AI company Anthropic in an Ontario court.
Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press say Anthropic infringed on their copyright by using their content to develop its large language AI model Claude."
WYATTE GRANTHAM-PHILIPS , WRAL News; AI agents are only as good as the personal information you share. That raises privacy concerns
"Many have welcomed AI agents into their online lives, and raved about how personalized assistants like Muse can handle everyday tasks with ease — from snagging a dinner reservation or planning a trip, to organizing email inboxes. But like other AI bots, the agents are only as good as the information they have access to. They perform better the more they know about a user — and perhaps also that person’s friends, family and even colleagues. That raises privacy concerns."
Kathryn Rubino , Above The Law; Tech Company Launches Program To Pay Law Firms For Their Emails, Privilege Be Damned
"Let’s ask the obvious question: is this tech company asking firms to sell attorney-client privileged communications and attorney work product? Because the emails where a litigation team hashes out strategy, the Teams threads workshopping a client’s walk-away number, the project histories tracking how a matter got from intake to settlement… that is the work. The process Mode is so eager to capture is, in a law office, exactly the thing privilege exists to protect.
Mode’s answer is scrubbing. The company says it built tools that “remove sensitive information and replace names and other identifying details,” and that firms get to approve which systems and date ranges are included before anything is exported. Which, I mean… sure. But privilege doesn’t belong to the firm, it belongs to the client. Swapping a client’s name for a placeholder doesn’t make a strategy memo any less a confidential communication, and Model Rule 1.6 reaches all information relating to the representation, not just the parts with a name attached. The ABA’s Formal Opinion 512 already says lawyers generally need a client’s informed consent before feeding their information into self-learning AI tools, and that was about using AI, not selling the raw materials to train someone else’s.
And there is no expiration date on privilege! The Supreme Court made that clear in Swidler & Berlin v. United States — the Vince Foster notes case — holding that the privilege survives even the client’s death. A matter that closed in 2014 is every bit as privileged today and “historical” is not a loophole. Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled earlier this year that a defendant who fed his lawyers’ advice into a consumer AI chatbot waived privilege over it, because sharing it with a third party is sharing it with a third party. Doing it for cash is not going to play better."
ANGELA LUNA , National Review; The Questions AI Copyright Cases Need to Answer
"But recent AI copyright cases are adding more complexity to these legal questions. The issue is no longer simply whether copyrighted works can be used to train AI; courts are looking more closely at how those works are acquired and used, what the models produce, and whether those products compete with — or potentially extract value from — the works that made them possible."
Girumkal Allehone and Dariush Raissi, The Tufts Daily; Tufts professor’s book among illegally pirated works in Anthropic copyright settlement
"The lawsuit, Bartz v. Anthropic, resulted in a ruling that $1.5 billion would be paid to authors and publishers across the country, including Associate Professor Craig Cipolla in the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University, among other academics, primarily in social science and humanities departments.
The lawsuit ruled that Anthropic’s use of legally acquired books was protected by fair use, but that Anthropic’s creation of a “central library” of some of these pirated works was not protected under copyright law.
The settlement covers materials that were accessed through copyright infringement to train models. In Cipolla’s case, he was notified that Anthropic’s dataset used his 2013 book, “Becoming Brothertown”.
“I was disappointed ... just because [of] the amount of hours that particular book — which is my first book — represents to me,” he said. “My own human hours.”
“In one fell swoop, essentially, a company took [the book] and uploaded it to train their AI,” Cipolla added. “It feels like they take it away and use it however they want, forever. They can’t take it out.”
Cipolla refrained from naming specific professors but explained his impression was that the impact of this infringement was widespread.
“They stole a lot — many, many, many books ... I would say it’s probably more than just tens of people [at Tufts]. I think it’s probably bigger than that, but I could be wrong.”
Cipolla explained that using books in AI development has implications beyond copyright law. He felt the case shows how AI use can reduce the need for critical thinking in producing research and writing, especially among students.
Similarly, Josephine Wolff, director of the Hitachi Center for Technology and International Affairs and associate dean for research at The Fletcher School, spoke about the main concerns that arise in academia regarding copyright infringement.
“Writing is, for almost every field, an important component of what we do, and that matters from a personal perspective: This is my writing, these are my thoughts and I want them to be attributed to me properly.”
Anthropic settled the case instead of going to trial, meaning it never reached a verdict that would set a legal precedent for other AI companies.
“Because we don’t get a legal ruling here, there remains some ambiguity about if I want to build a new LLM and compete with all of the existing ones, am I able to do this?” Wolff said.
Additionally, Wolff said preventing copyrighted research from being accessed for training is not straightforward for both future professors and current academics looking to publish.
“I guess you could think about which publisher you’re publishing with. ... You could try to find a publisher that doesn’t make any deals with any online or e-book distributors, but it would be pretty extreme,” said Wolff.
The difficulty in addressing and preventing copyright issues is partly rooted in the intense competition within the international AI race, which undermines the importance of copyright infringement."
Fiona Riley, Forbes; USA Today Sues OpenAI For Over $250 Million, Alleging Willful Copyright Infringement
"USA Today Co., Inc. and 13 affiliated entities are seeking more than $250 million in damages from OpenAI, including up to $150,000 for each willfully infringed work and up to $25,000 for every time OpenAI stripped copyright information, according to the complaint, which was filed in New York federal court on Thursday."
DAN MCLAUGHLIN , National Review; Copyright Protects Against Training AI on Legal Headnotes
"When is training artificial intelligence on somebody else’s work a copyright violation? The Third Circuit federal court of appeals decided to draw a line in Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence, Inc.
Judicial opinions can’t be copyrighted, because they are official government documents. But from the earliest days of the republic, they were published not by the courts but in privately compiled law books sold for profit. West Publishing, for many years, has published volumes of opinions with numbers that become their official citations, and has used a proprietary “keynote” system (complete with its own Dewey Decimal System–like numerical classifications by topic) for summarizing at the front of an opinion its conclusions on various points of law. In its books and later its Westlaw system for computerized legal research (which itself has been around since the early 1990s), West has always taken very seriously the unique, copyrighted value that these headnotes (what West brands as “keynotes”) add to the opinions themselves. Indeed, the Supreme Court noted as far back as Callaghan v. Myers (1888) that judicial opinions are not copyrightable but that a private publisher can get “a copyright for the volume which will cover the matter which is the result of his intellectual labor” such as “head-notes.”"
Ethan Penny and Dan Milmo , The Guardian; Oxford lets OpenAI train its AI models on Bodleian Library
"Meeting minutes at the University of Oxford, obtained via a freedom of information request, record concerns from staff, including members of the Bodleian governance committee, about the reputational risk of partnering with OpenAI and the effect on the university’s environmental commitments of striking a deal involving an energy-intensive technology.
Booksellers have also reported a spate of orders for obscure titles such as a guide to agricultural implements in 18th-century Africa or biographies of 1950s car drivers. Secondhand bookshop owners have speculated that because the titles are unlikely to exist online in digitised form, they represent fresh data that can be consumed by the next generation of AI models.
Scraped websites are increasingly saturated with AI-generated material, making them less useful for training models, and developers have turned to physical, often historical, book collections.
OpenAI has struck similar agreements with US research libraries such as Boston Public Library, Caltech, MIT, and the University of Michigan under a project called NextGenAI. Oxford is the only UK member of the project.
By June 2025, 125,000 images scanned from historical dissertations had been shared with OpenAI from the Bodleian collection, including PhD theses from European and American universities written in the 19th and 20th centuries. Other texts scanned include a rare collection of 10,000 16th-century “broadside ballads” containing song lyrics and musical notes that were once circulated on Tudor street corners. Staff have also discussed digitising of 18th-century Irish state papers, the private letters of Irish novelist Marie Edgeworth, and Dorothy Hodgkin’s penicillin notebooks.
The OpenAI contract with Oxford also raises the prospect of the mass digitisation of the Bodleian’s collection consisting of 23m items. The minutes also discussed the creation of an “Ask the Bod” chatbot.
A spokesperson for the University of Oxford said the amount of text being digitised was “modest in scale” and covered only out-of-copyright material. The Bodleian keeps the rights to the scans and will begin publishing them openly online within months, the spokesperson said."
Sara Fischer, Kerry Flynn, Axios; Scoop: DOJ's copyright filing took key agencies by surprise
"The Department of Justice's statement of interest supporting OpenAI and Microsoft in the New York Times' copyright infringement lawsuit surprised critical agencies like the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Copyright Office, sources told Axios.
Why it matters: Statements of interest allow the government to declare an official position on a legal matter in private lawsuits. While not binding, they can hold significant weight and help persuade cases.
Between the lines: Publishers have criticized the claims in the SOI, including the idea that enforcing copyright laws is too cumbersome and would threaten America's AI dominance over foreign rivals."
ADAM FELDMAN, Legalytics; The AI Copyright Cases Are Starting to Tell Us Something
"The emerging question is therefore no longer simply whether AI companies can train on copyrighted material. A potentially more useful set of questions is coming into view: What exactly did the defendant copy? How did it obtain the material? What copies did it retain? What can the resulting system reproduce or retrieve? Does the AI product compete with the copyright owner’s market? And what evidence exists that the challenged conduct has actually produced market harm?
The answers do not yet produce a reliable formula for predicting who will win though. Most of the litigation remains unresolved, and motions to dismiss, preliminary injunctions, summary judgments, and settlements answer different legal questions. But the accumulated cases now provide enough variation to identify where the pressure points are developing. And those key points suggest that the next phase of AI copyright litigation may look considerably less like one giant test of AI training than the first wave of cases made it appear.
Two Courts, but an Increasingly Diverse Set of Cases
The litigation is remarkably concentrated geographically. Of the 105 captured U.S. infringement actions, 49 were filed in the Northern District of California and 32 in the Southern District of New York. Together those districts account for 77% of the filings in the dataset.
Consolidation does not explain away the pattern. When related proceedings are collapsed into litigation families, roughly the same share—76%—remains centered in those two courts."
Karen Weise and Mike Isaac , The New York Times; Microsoft and OpenAI Workers Worry About ‘Largest Theft of Labor’ in History
Newly unsealed court documents showed concern within Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of millions of news articles to develop A.I. systems.
"Newly unsealed court documents showed considerable concern within Microsoft and its close partner OpenAI over the use of millions of news articles to develop artificial intelligence systems.
As OpenAI was forging ahead with its work, Microsoft employees debated whether what OpenAI was doing represented the “largest theft of labor in human history” and could create a “doom loop” that could ultimately threaten the quality of the large language models they were building...
Snippets of those discussions were made public on Thursday as part of a closely watched lawsuit The New York Times filed against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023. Eleven other publishers have joined the suit. Judge Sidney H. Stein of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is considering motions for a summary judgment. Documents related to the case are slowly being unsealed as the judge considers those motions.
The publishers argue that the tech companies violated copyright law by scraping millions of their stories off the internet and other databases, and using the text, without approval or pay, to train advanced A.I. systems.
Microsoft and OpenAI contend their work was covered under legal protections for “fair use” of copyrighted material. They say the articles were sufficiently transformed into entirely new work by A.I., and were not substitutes that harm the value of the original work."
David Gewirtz, ZDNET; Why the DOJ’s OpenAI copyright stance is the real threat to national security
The DOJ argues that AI training is transformative fair use, but publishers say unlicensed scraping threatens their survival. This copyright fight could shape the future of online knowledge.
"Ever since generative AI arrived in early 2023, we’ve seen that its almost unlimited base of knowledge is due to how the big AI companies trained their models. To a large degree, AI models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic have been trained on anything they could ingest, including nearly all the copyrighted material on the web.
The AI companies are even reported to be buying up physical books by the millions, cutting them apart, scanning them in, and then disposing of the remains. For example, based on a search of the Anthropic settlement database, I know the company scanned my book, The Flexible Enterprise, and included it in the Claude corpus. I was never asked for permission. I don’t even get a free Claude account.
Due to the bulk ingestion of intellectual property, many companies filed suit against the AI companies. One such company is Ziff Davis, the owner of ZDNET. Disclosure: Ziff is also the company that pays me each week for my writing here.
Two weeks ago, on Sept. 1, 2026, the US Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, where the case is being litigated. What makes this statement particularly interesting is that the DOJ is not one of the parties in the case. The government is putting its thumb on the scale, weighing in on a lawsuit between private parties.
On Monday, Fortune published a commentary by Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis, regarding the Justice Department’s unusual intervention in the case. In this article, I’ll briefly summarize the DOJ’s statement, then discuss Shah’s premise, and then pick up and expand upon it with some of my own thoughts."
Mike Isaac and Karen Weise , The New York Times; Court Filings in A.I. Suit Invoke Copyright Law, Culture and Sports
Filings made Friday in The New York Times’s closely watched lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft included a range of copyright law and cultural references.
"Court filings made Friday in a closely watched copyright trial pitting The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft invoked a wide range of material, including relevant copyright law, arts and sports.
The suit, filed in 2023 by The Times and joined by a group of other news outlets, claims that OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence start-up, and its partner Microsoft infringed on the publishers’ copyrighted material by using millions of their articles to train A.I. technologies. A.I. companies now compete with The Times as a source of information, the news outlet argued in its suit.
The briefs, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, largely boiled down to two questions: whether the publishers’ news articles were sufficiently “transformed” into an entirely new work by A.I., and whether A.I. produced content that “substituted” for news articles and harmed their value.
Friday was the last day the companies could file motions for a summary judgment that would head off a trial. Judge Sidney H. Stein is expected to make a ruling in the coming weeks."
Karen Weise and Mike Isaac, The New York Times; Justice Dept. Sides With OpenAI in New York Times Copyright Suit
"The Justice Department told a Manhattan federal court that it was in the national interest for the judge to find that OpenAI did not violate copyright law when it used articles by The New York Times and other publishers to develop artificial intelligence systems.
The filing late Tuesday was the first time the Justice Department weighed in on the use of copyrighted material by A.I. companies, which has led to several lawsuits, including one brought by The Times.
The Justice Department argued that developing A.I. was critical to national security, and that training A.I. systems sufficiently transformed the written works to new material allowed under copyright law. It said the benefits of A.I. “far outweigh any competitive harm.”
The government’s intervention is an escalation in the landmark litigation that could determine whether OpenAI violated the law when it was developing its A.I. systems and had harmed the news industry and other content creators...
The Times’s lawsuit is one of many amid a wave of legal action against A.I. companies over copyright claims."
Ben Berkowitz , Axios; Sony, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging "blatant theft" of intellectual property
"Some of the world's largest music publishers filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday night, alleging "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."
Why it matters: The suit is the opening salvo in what is now likely to be a yearslong fight over music, AI, and how intellectual property is protected in a new era of technology.
Driving the news: Units of Sony Music and Warner Music filed the suit in federal court in northern California late Friday night, naming Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.
The big picture: The Sony/Warner lawsuit is notable because it's broad.
It alleges Anthropic unlawfully trained its models off "tens of thousands" of music publishers' copyrighted compositions, whereas other lawsuits have focused on a narrower set of works.
BMG's lawsuit against Anthropic, for example, claims infringement against 493 compositions."
Richard Busch , JD Supra; From Napster to Sampling to AI: Copyright Law’s Role as the Sheriff to Emerging Technology
"Copyright law rarely meets new technology at the start. More often, it arrives after technology, and those behind it seeking to push (or ignore) the law for monetary gain have already changed markets, habits, and expectations. In music, that pattern has repeated across many major technological shifts. This article focuses on several: digital sampling, which made fragments of existing recordings newly usable in the studio; digital downloads, which changed the economics of distribution; interactive streaming, which made all music available for license on demand; platform music libraries, which embedded music into social media tools; and artificial intelligence, where those building literally trillion dollar businesses have trained on copyrighted works, and used others’ voice and likeness. In each of these instances, creators and rights holders have had to ask courts, Congress, or regulators to apply existing legal frameworks to commercial realities.
My work in music copyright litigation has often involved a recurring collision between music, technology, and copyright law."
Charles Graeber, The New York Times; The Original Sin of Anthropic’s Claude
"One day, hopefully copyright protections will be extended to prevent the unlicensed training of A.I.s.
Until then, we live in a legal gray area, in which giant cash-rich corporations gorge freely on the rights of individual creators. The big ones will continue to eat the little ones unless the little ones can band together.
It’s up to us to demand legislation extending copyright protections in the 21st century. Many members of Congress appear willing; property protections have appeal for both sides of the aisle.
Affirming those copyright protections to include A.I. might even force A.I. companies to hire human writers to create original works for their L.L.M.s to train on. Or perhaps they’ll start spending their treasure like modern Medicis, funding the quality work A.I.s need to stay sharp. At the very least, they might invest in publishing houses and writing programs, fending off model collapse while ushering in a Silicon Era of artistic enlightenment.
I worry for this generation of artists coming of age in yet another technological adolescence, on the brink of so many cultural and economic disruptions.
But I do not worry for the future of art itself. We will always need human mediators to translate the human experience and make the flesh word."
Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch ; Is it legal to train AI models on copyrighted books? It’s complicated
"You probably know by now that the AI models powering ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other chatbots are trained on seemingly infinite databases of published works, containing hundreds of millions of books, online articles, academic papers, and basically anything you can find on the internet. Most published authors have, without their knowledge or consent, contributed to the development of the same AI tools that threaten to undermine their livelihoods. That seems illegal, right?
The reality isn’t that simple.
“I think one of the issues with this entire area of law and this entire area of technology is there’s a lot going on,” Cathy Gellis, an attorney with expertise in intellectual property, copyright, and technology, told TechCrunch. “It’s very complex and there are a lot of raw feelings about what is happening, both for and against.”"
ASHLEY BELANGER , Ars Technica; Hidden Airtag reveals Amazon is trashing rare books to train AI
"For the past year or so, booksellers have suspected that AI firms are buying up huge lots of rare books, then destroying them after scanning them to train AI. But this was hard to prove until now, as 404 Media reports that an Airtag hidden in a rare book shows that at least one tech giant, in the race to advance its frontier models, is behind some of the bulk orders: Amazon.
On Monday, 404 Media revealed that it had connected with a bookseller who agreed to plant an Airtag in a rare book that was part of a bulk order. That Airtag was then tracked to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas that housed a team focused on tearing books from their spines and scanning pages, 404 Media reported. Apparently tone-deaf to the escalating backlash over destructive book scanning, a logo on the door of that team’s warehouse, VGT3, showed a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book, 404 Media documented."
"Apple’s top directors and officers knew of copyright violations while training artificial intelligence models, leading to potentially liabilities and reputational damages, a new investor lawsuit said.
Apple’s executives and board members violated their fiduciary duties and acted in bad faith by “knowingly or recklessly” causing the company to engage in copyright infringement, according to shareholder Phil Rosen’s derivative lawsuit filed Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Multiple tech giants have been sued by shareholders over AI-related claims, including copyright concerns and allegations that they over-hyped capabilities. Apple is also facing separate copyright infringement lawsuits.
Apple trained its models on data sets that included pirated books as well as videos extracted without authorization from YouTube or the copyright of those works, the lawsuit said."
