Two federal judges in the same courthouse came to different opinions on whether AI firms are breaching copyrights, signaling more legal confusion.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup's ruling this week, in a case brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson last year, opens a potential pathway for AI companies to train their large language models on copyrighted works without authors' consent — but only if copies of the works were obtained legally.

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled on Wednesday for Meta Platforms against a group of authors who had argued that its use of their books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system infringed their copyrights.