• by Wendy Davis , August 11, 2025

A federal judge on Monday rejected Anthropic's request to pause a copyright suit by authors while it attempts to appeal his ruling allowing the matter to proceed as a class-action.

U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup in the Northern District of California also appeared to suggest he will not authorize an immediate appeal of his ruling rejecting the company's fair-use defense to claims that it infringed copyright by downloading millions of pirated books in order to train the chatbot Claude.

"Anthropic wants immediate, 'meaningful appellate review,' skipping over the trial part altogether," Alsup wrote in his ruling denying the artificial intelligence company's request for a stay.

The new ruling request comes in a class-action complaint brought in August 2024 by three authors -- Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson -- who alleged Anthropic infringed copyright by training its chatbot Claude on their books.

Alsup ruled recently that Anthropic's use of purchased books for training was "exceedingly transformative," and therefore protected by fair use principles. But the judge also said Anthropic did not have a fair use defense to claims that it trained Claude on books downloaded from piracy sites.

Alsup subsequently determined that the lawsuit could proceed as a class-action on behalf of copyright owners of books in the libraries LibGen and PiLiMi -- which offer pirated copies.

Anthropic recently asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to review Alsup's decision to certify a class of copyright owners. The appellate court hasn't yet said whether it will hear the case.

Late last month, Anthropic asked Alsup to pause the case until the 9th Circuit says whether it will weigh in.

"The court should issue a stay pending potential appellate guidance on the weighty issues presented, particularly given the potentially profound and unfair harm to Anthropic from further litigation and a trial under the present framework," Anthropic wrote.

Anthropic also asked Alsup to allow an immediate appeal of the ruling depriving the company of a fair use defense for pirated books.

Alsup is expected to take up that request at an August 28 hearing, but suggested Monday that he will not authorize the appeal.

He wrote that he "agrees that this case bristles with important issues of 'fair use,'" adding that Anthropic already partially prevailed on some of those issues.

"The remainder of the fair use issues on which it failed to win summary judgment (the pirated library part) should be adjudicated only after a trial so that, on appeal, our court of appeals will have the benefit of a full record and findings, rather than just the self-serving and sanitized declarations served up by Anthropic," Alsup wrote.

He noted in the ruling that Anthropic argues it could face a "business-threatening injury" before the appellate court can hear the case, but appeared to discount that possibility, writing that Anthropic's "doomsday calculation is premised on every eventuality coming out completely against its druthers."

"The crux is its assumption that Anthropic will lose and lose badly at every trench, and that this will lead it to have to post a bond for appeal so large as to kill the entire company," Alsup continued, adding that this scenario "piles assumption upon assumption."

"For all we know at this stage, Anthropic will persuade the jury to find facts vindicating it completely," Alsup wrote.

"But if Anthropic loses big it will be because what it did wrong was also big," he added.