Third Circuit upholds ruling against AI training as fair use

Here's the headline authors have been waiting on: a federal appeals court just upheld a finding that training an AI model on copyrighted work is not automatically "fair use." That's the Third Circuit, ruling on the Ross Intelligence case, and it matters well beyond the parties involved.

For two years, every AI copyright lawsuit — and there are many — has leaned on one unresolved question: does training a model on someone's book count as "transformative" use the law protects, or is it just unauthorised copying with extra steps? Publishers and tech companies have fought that question in courtroom after courtroom, often with opposite results from different judges. This ruling doesn't settle the whole fight, but it puts real appellate weight behind the authors' side of it.

And yet — here's the twist, and it's worth sitting with. Copyright Lately's read on the same ruling is blunt: "Everyone won the Ross fair use appeal. Except Ross." Ross Intelligence brought this case and lost its own appeal, even as the underlying legal principle it was fighting against — that AI training isn't automatically fair use — got upheld. That's not a contradiction in the reporting; it's just how appellate rulings work sometimes. The company lost its case. The precedent it leaves behind helps everyone else.

What this means for you: if you've got a claim in, or are weighing whether to file one, against a company that trained a model on your book without a licence, this ruling is now citable ammunition. It's a Third Circuit decision, which carries weight beyond its own jurisdiction — courts elsewhere will read it, cite it, argue with it. That's exactly the kind of precedent that shapes settlement numbers in the Anthropic-style cases still working through the system.

Here's what to actually do this week. If you're already part of any AI-training litigation or class action — Anthropic, OpenAI, or others — check with your Guild or counsel on whether this ruling gets cited in your case, and ask directly. If you haven't filed anything and think your work was used to train a model, this is the week to find out whether a claims process exists for you; don't wait for a settlement to announce itself. And if you're reading three different accounts of this same ruling and they don't quite agree on what it means for the losing party versus the legal principle — that's not spin, that's just appellate law being appellate law. Keep watching this one. It's the foundation everything else gets built on.