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AI Daily Brief — 23 June 2025

A landmark legal Monday. Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California issued the first US summary-judgment ruling on whether training an LLM on copyrighted books is fair use — and split the answer. Anthropic won big on legally purchased books (“exceedingly transformative”) but lost on the 7M+ pirated books it downloaded into a “central library”, sending that piece to trial. Capital flowed: Harvey closed a $300M Series E at $5B, and Bloomberg broke the Thinking Machines $2B/$10B seed.

Top stories

  • Bartz v. Anthropic: fair use for training, piracy heads to trial. Judge Alsup ruled Claude’s training on legally purchased books “exceedingly transformative” and fair use under Section 107 — but denied summary judgment on Anthropic’s 7M+ pirated downloads, sending that issue to a damages trial. First substantive US ruling on fair use as a defense in LLM training. via NPR
  • Authors Guild calls the ruling “mixed”. The Guild noted the surviving piracy claim could mean substantial damages; Authors Alliance framed it as Anthropic winning on fair use but losing on building a “central library” of pirated books. via Authors Guild
  • Harvey closes $300M Series E at $5B. Legal-AI startup Harvey announced the round co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue, lifting valuation to $5B just four months after a $3B Series D from Sequoia. Existing backers including Sequoia, GV, DST Global, Conviction, Elad Gil, OpenAI Startup Fund and RELX’s REV joined. Harvey serves 337 legal clients with plans to double its 340-person headcount. via Harvey
  • Bloomberg confirms Thinking Machines $2B at $10B. Bloomberg’s Monday scoop confirmed Mira Murati’s stealth startup closing close to $2B in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Accel and Conviction participating. Founding team draws from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta and Mistral AI. via Bloomberg
  • Iran strikes US Al Udeid base in Qatar. At ~19:40 local, Iran launched ~14 ballistic missiles at the US Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in retaliation for the weekend US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. US air defenses intercepted 13; no casualties. Iran warned Qatar and the US in advance. via Al Jazeera

Who shipped

The day’s biggest “shipment” was a court order. Anthropic got a partial win and a partial trial date. Harvey and Thinking Machines shipped capital announcements.

Open-source pulse

Hugging Face Daily Papers logged an active research day (top submission at 79 upvotes); no major open-weight model releases from China labs on the day itself.

Money, infra & hardware

Brent crude was only up about 1% in early trading despite the Al Udeid strike, keeping the AI capex / energy thesis intact for hyperscaler buildouts. AMD’s MI350 family and MLPerf Training v5.0 first submission continued framing the silicon backdrop.

Quiet corners

Anthropic’s status page logged elevated error rates across multiple Claude models from 14:08 to 15:33 UTC — a small wobble landing the same day as the headline fair-use ruling.

By the numbers

  • 7M+ — pirated books Anthropic downloaded into its “central library”, heading to trial
  • $300M / $5B — Harvey Series E size and valuation
  • $2B / $10B — Thinking Machines Lab seed round and valuation
  • ~14 — Iranian ballistic missiles at Al Udeid, 13 intercepted
  • ~1% — Brent crude move after the strike

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 23 June 2025.