Assertion Contradicted AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 5/5 debate potential 2/5

Prince: California courts issued contradictory rulings on AI training fair use

Matthew Prince · Can We Save The Web From AI? — With Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince · Aug 13, 2025 · at 13:34

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince explains the legal ambiguity surrounding generative AI training on copyrighted web content.

0:00 / 0:07exact quote · 7.8s

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“We literally had two different California cases that came out on both sides of that issue. Is, Training on content fair use or not.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

The claim, plainly

Two California court cases issued conflicting rulings on whether training AI models on web content constitutes fair use under copyright law.

a quote alone can be ambiguous, so this restates it with the references and context of the conversation around it resolved. AI-written; the tape below the player is the source.

Assessment

Public legal records prior to August 13, 2025, do not show conflicting California court rulings on whether training AI models constitutes fair use under copyright law. The two major California federal court decisions that addressed the merits on summary judgment in June 2025—Bartz v. Anthropic PBC (N.D. Cal.) and Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (N.D. Cal.)—both held that training large language models on copyrighted works was transformative and constituted fair use. The notable ruling rejecting a fair use defense for AI training came from outside California, specifically the District of Delaware in Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. ROSS Intelligence Inc.

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, No. 24-cv-05417 (N.D. Cal. June 23, 2025) ruled that model training was transformative and constituted fair use.
Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 23-cv-03417 (N.D. Cal. June 25, 2025) granted summary judgment for Meta, ruling training on copyrighted books was fair use.
The conflicting decision rejecting fair use for AI training occurred in Delaware (Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence), not California.

Checked against

[1] whitecase.com [2] goodwinlaw.com [3] millercanfield.com [4] duanemorris.com [5] aivortex.io [6] mckoolsmith.com [7] laweconcenter.org [8] debevoisedatablog.com

"California" court "fair use" AI training models conflicting rulings "fair use" "AI" ruling California court "training" 2024 OR 2025 "Andersen v. Stability AI" "fair use" ruling 2024 OR 2025 "Tremblay v. OpenAI" "fair use" ruling 2024 OR 2025 "Silverman v. OpenAI" "fair use" ruling 2024 OR 2025

assessed as of 2026-09-02

This assessment is an AI reading of a public statement, made against the cited references with the confidence shown. It can be wrong. The quote, the tape and the references are all on this page; if something is off, use report an error below. full disclaimer →

Mentioned

California cases fair use

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