Anthropic trained Claude on illegally obtained Stanford professors' books

kenmacd

The title is (I believe intentionally) inaccurate. Better would be: Anthropic trained on illegally acquired Stanford professors' books The article does not say the training was illegal (although does discuss the professors push for a licensing model).

mkw5053

Of course they did, same with almost every other bit of training material that isn't synthetic (and still indirectly created with illegally obtained training data)

CPUHall

Title is misleading. The ruling said training on books is fair use. What got them in trouble was grabbing the books from LibGen instead of just buying them, which is a pretty dumb way to lose $1.5B. If I torrented half a million books I'd be getting a lot more than a $3k-per-book settlement.

iamleppert

Good! Information wants to be free, not locked up in some ivory tower. This is a great time upon us, when academics and ivy league elites can no longer gate keep knowledge and hoard it for their ego. Knowledge should benefit humanity as broadly as possible, not just the rich and their academic ilk.

whywhywhywhy

They did the same with literally everyone's data. Is it supposed to matter more because a "Stanford professor's" work was included?

piltdownman

And I presume the Anthropic CEO will be indicted on 13 felony counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and for wire fraud. Like Aaron Swartz, right? Right? N.B. JSTOR explicitly settled with Swartz, suffered no financial harm, and begged the federal government to drop the case. The government refused and prosecuted Swartz anyway. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion primarily because of the theft and storage of the files, but this was somehow a Civil issue...

linuxftw

Does copyright over knowledge-based works really have any legitimate position in today's society? We're entering a new age of how information is created, used, and distributed.

bushido

They should get Opus or one of the latest models to be the morality judge of what goes into training. I had an issue recently where I asked claude code to log into a developer user on Chrome on my local host for a system which is fully local and part of the code base the agent was developing and it refused to do it, like flat out refused, I did it on multiple sessions and I could not get Claude to budge on entering the credentials - it required me to manually sign in. Would be amazing if they used that same level of training for their intake exercises.

xlayn

Training on the book being fair use for something whose whole deal is to take those ideas and exercise them is the steal of our time... So you come with this amazing idea regarding anything... how to build a chip, how to write software... and you write a book on how to... Then a model eat it... spit it for free (they could get an advantage from being able to exercise that logic) and it's fair use... Then... why torrent it, can't they sent someone to buy the book and scan it or buy it in pdf?

pier25

Of course they did. AI companies have pirated and stolen all sorts of content. What we know of is probably only the tip of the iceberg. As for the training being fair use, this is still disputed: https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-ma...

awakeasleep

That professor saying that the use of work he already produced amounts to "slave labor"... copyright infringement is substantially different than slavery.

hollowonepl

I’m fine with it as long as Anthropic is fine we can distill their models to create own without burning all that energy (vide DeepSeek case)

Sha1rholder

Humanity is suffering from large scale distillation attack from Anthropic.

pluc

Didn't it train Claude on illegally obtained everything?

lokar

I think pushing ahead to a jury trial is a smart move. In the current climate you have a good chance of a very favorable jury pool.

blamestross

The primary value of a LLM is automated intellectual property laundering.

NelsonMinar

I'm willing to bet the vast majority of students and professors at Stanford have consulted an "illegally obtained" textbook at some point. Either directly from Anna or second hand.

j45

Ability to pay might influence this outcome.

j45

It would be funny to ask the profs if they are allowed, by law, to read 3 textbooks on a subject and then write a 4th themselves. After a 1.5 billion settlement, the professor/authors are saying it's not enough. The judge had an interesting summary of AI: "He compared AI training to how humans can read, internalize and remember a book’s themes and style. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” he wrote."