Ninth Circuit Hears Appeal in Amazon vs. Perplexity Case

The Ninth Circuit issued a landmark ruling on August 4, 2026 in case 26‑1444, addressing whether the use of copyrighted text for training artificial‑intelligence models constitutes copyright infringement. The case arose after a coalition of authors sued OpenAI, alleging that the company’s use of their works in the training of its language model violated the Copyright Act. In a 2‑to‑1 decision, the court held that the use was protected under the doctrine of fair use, thereby rejecting the plaintiffs’ claims.

In applying the four‑factor fair‑use test, the majority emphasized the transformative nature of the training process, noting that the AI model does not reproduce the original works but rather extracts patterns and statistical relationships. The court also found that the amount of text used was limited relative to the entire corpus, that the training had no adverse effect on the market for the original works, and that the purpose was to create a new, non‑commercial technology. The dissenting