Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At least not as far as the courts are concerned. Alsup ruled [0] that feeding a book into an LLM is transformative and counts as fair use. Especially when they purchased a physical copy of the book, scanned it, and destroyed the original. > But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM (as long as they eventually deleted them afterwards) The w…
> And since they literally destroyed the books (not just delete files, which would be copied), that made it transformative. You have to be careful, just because the judge points a factor out as notable, doesn't mean that factor was required. The destruction of source books makes Anthropic's fair use argument [2] especially air tight, but it would be a mistake to assume that act was required, or is what made it transf…
> Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to “conserv[ing] space” through format conversion and found it transformative. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company’s earlier piracy undermined its position.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
Based on that I get the impression it's quite literally the destruction part that makes it transformative, without it, it wouldn't have been tranformative at all.