In a recent ruling, Judge William Alsup revealed that Anthropic had scanned millions of used books for its AI chatbot Claude, spending millions on acquiring physical texts, which were then cut and scanned. However, the company also downloaded over 7 million pirated books, deemed illegal by the court. While the judge accepted that the use of purchased books could fall under fair use, the extensive downloading of pirated content was clearly against copyright law. This case highlights ongoing tensions between AI development and the rights of authors and publishers.
"The OpenAI rival spent 'many millions of dollars' buying used print books, which the company or its vendors then stripped of their bindings, cut the pages, and scanned into digital files."
"Anthropic preferred to 'steal' books to avoid 'legal/practice/business slog,' as cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei put it."
Collection
[
|
...
]