Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

Anthropic's cofounder, Ben Mann, downloaded million copies of books from Library Genesis in 2021, fully aware that the material was pirated.

Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.

At least most pirates just consume for personal use. Profiting from piracy is a whole other level beyond just pirating a book.

This isn't really profiting from piracy. They don't make money off the raw input data. It's no different to consuming for personal use.

They make money off the model weights, which is fair use (as confirmed by recent case law).

This is absurd. Remove all of the content from the training data that was pirated and what is the quality of the end product now?

With Claude, people are paying Anthropic to access answers that are generated from pirated books, without the authors permission, credit, or compensation.

There is no copyright on knowledge.

If it outputs parts of the book verbatim then that's a different story.