In the latest twist of the AI and copyright violation saga, a California federal judge has ruled that Anthropic training its LLM Claude on copyrighted books was “fair use and “transformative” — “like any reader aspiring to be a writer.” The part of the lawsuit, brought by three authors, that focuses on Anthropic maintaining a central library of some 7 million pirated books, will proceed to trial. That claim could still result in damages.

Nonprofit watchdog Media Matters has filed suit in D.C. district court to block FTC investigation of its reporting on Elon Musk’s X. Media Matters very plausibly sees the FTC scrutiny as a Trump administration and/or Elon Musk-inspired attack on its First Amendment rights. This follows the FTC blocking holding company Omnicom from refusing to place media buys on political or ideological grounds.

The web search tool Perplexity looks like it’s taking on Google with its latest release, a web browser named Comet. Comet claims to move “from browsing to thinking,” surfacing information and search results in response to natural language queries. Comet is available immediately to Perplexity Max subscribers; others can join a wait list.