Thomson Reuters AI copyright dispute must go to trial, judge says

FILE PHOTO: The Thomson Reuters logo is seen on the company building in Times Square, New York, U.S., January 30, 2018. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo

(Reuters) - A jury must decide the outcome of a lawsuit by information services company Thomson Reuters accusing Ross Intelligence of unlawfully copying content from its legal-research platform Westlaw to train a competing artificial intelligence-based platform, a Delaware federal judge said on Monday.

The decision by U.S. Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas sets the stage for what could be one of the first trials related to the unauthorized use of data to train AI systems. Tech companies including Meta Platforms, Stability AI and Microsoft-backed OpenAI are also facing lawsuits from authors, visual artists and other copyright owners over the use of their work to train the companies' generative AI software.