Federal Appeals Court Rejects Fair Use For AI Training In A Closely Watched Copyright Case

Published: 10/1/2026

Source: AI Musicpreneur — Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Appeals Ruling

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld a ruling that ROSS Intelligence’s use of copyrighted Westlaw headnotes to train an AI legal-research system was not fair use.

The decision concerns legal research rather than music. However, it is important to the AI music industry because the RIAA and National Music Publishers’ Association supported Thomson Reuters and argued that copying protected works to build a competing AI product should not qualify as fair use.

Why it matters: This is the first federal appellate ruling directly addressing fair use in AI training, but it does not decide the pending cases against Suno, Udio or Anthropic. Those cases are outside the Third Circuit and involve different works, markets and technical facts.

The ruling gives music rightsholders a new appellate precedent to cite. It does not create a nationwide rule that every form of AI training infringes copyright.

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