Until two weeks ago, no U.S. court had ruled on whether training generative AI models on copyrighted works could constitute a fair use, or if the simple act of training such models without a license would constitute copyright infringement. Two new summary judgment rulings out of the Northern District of California have now set the stage for how future courts may interpret fair use in the context of AI training—Richard Kadrey, et al., v. Meta Platforms, Inc. and Andrea Bartz, et al. v. Anthropic PBC. That stage poses significant dangers for technology companies.

            In both cases, the ...

On May 1, 2025, a federal courtroom in San Francisco became ground zero for one of the most consequential copyright hearings in recent memory. The three hour hearing in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms marked the first major judicial test of whether using copyrighted works to train generative AI systems—like Meta’s LLaMA models—qualifies as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law. While Judge Vince Chhabria has yet to issue a formal decision, his comments during oral argument offer critical clues about how courts may approach this issue going forward.

Fair use, codified in 17 U.S.C. § ...