Tech companies are celebrating a major ruling on fair use for AI training, but a closer read shows big legal risks still lie ahead. Big Tech scored a major victory this week in the battle over using copyrighted materials to train AI models.

In a test case for the artificial intelligence industry, a federal judge has ruled that AI company Anthropic didn’t break the law by training its chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books. But the company is still on the hook and must now go to trial over how it acquired those books by downloading them from online “shadow libraries” of pirated copies.

The battle over copyright and AI training continues unabated. Overall, publishers have yet to achieve a truly clear victory that could serve as a precedent against the use of content to feed LLMs. Now,