In just the past few months, conventional wisdom has crept into the A.I. wars—namely, that the use of copyrighted material to train A.I. models will eventually be blessed as “fair use.” But perhaps that conclusion is a touch premature. Yes, the courts may well end up there. (I’ve been saying that for years.) But the evidence that they’re already on that glide path is perilously thin. It rests almost entirely on two summer rulings—Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta, both out of San Francisco—while conveniently ignoring decisions that cut the other way. Chief among them is Thomson Reuters’s lawsuit against A.I. startup Ross Intelligence, which is now teed up to become the first appellate word on the issue after a U.S. District Court rejected Ross’s fair use defense and ruled that the company had infringed Thomson Reuters’s copyrights earlier this year.