Anthropic trained Claude on illegally obtained Stanford professors' books

If you're unaware of who he was, or what happened to him:

* He was one of 12 others who helped to spec out RSS' standard (when he was 14 years old).

* He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.

* He was one of the reasons Reddit protested SOPA back in the day (the same day that good 'old Kim Dotcom was raided and arrested by the US, the irony of which being that they swore up and down that they needed SOPA in order to do what they did to Kim Dotcom).

* I didn't know this before: he also developed the markdown publishing format with John Gruber.

What happened to him?

He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems. He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.

It is abhorrent to me that we have people doing more malicious hacks that get no repercussions. Someone at OpenAI / Anthropic should be 100% liable for criminal charges of what their AI models do. Need I remind everyone, that these models can run way faster than what we common folk can see, the speed at which they run these models internally can go so quickly that by the time the model is discovered to have hacked someone, it could very well be too late. Just try the "fast" feature of Claude Code, now imagine Claude launching thousands of sub-agents at top speed internally, the capacity for unprecedented destruction is the most concerning thing to me, I say that as someone who uses Claude every week.

The Anthropic class action was already settled. It's what they mention in the opening of the article. Anthropic got in trouble for downloading the books (pirating) but it was determined to be fair use to use the content for training.

Aaron Swartz was not charged with piracy or downloading PDFs, even though that's how the story has been told. The charges were related to him breaking into a private wiring closet, hiding a laptop, and circumventing access controls on a system.

The Aaron Swartz charges were ridiculous. I'm not disputing that. However, there isn't an equivalent charge in this Anthropic case. Even if you or I get caught downloading pirated PDFs of eBooks from a torrent, the CFAA would not apply.

The main class action suit was already decided. The Stanford professors in this story opted out of the class action and are trying to get higher individual settlements with their own lawyers.

> Similar to the claims in Bartz, the plaintiffs allege that Anthropic illegally downloaded, reproduced and distributed their copyrighted books from “shadow libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi, and that Anthropic broke the law by downloading and storing the pirated files in a central library.

We shouldn't be using that as precedent; in fact, it should be the opposite.

If he were still here, he would be 40 in only a couple of weeks.

Anthropic training their model outside of public sight without intent to redistribute, and had a large paper trail that expressed they believed they were acting within fair use.

A case which never went to trial and tanked the prosecutor’s career resulting in no more prosecutions of its kind to date.

Let’s not hanker for a return to that.

I don't understand how people have just moved past all these various obvious flaws in the foundations of our society. It's like finding a bug and saying "we don't need to patch it" and then building on top of it, all while knowing it exists. We all know that something is fundamentally wrong.

... and the course of action of Carmen Ortiz', the responsible Attorney General, drove Aaron Swartz into suicide.

Yes, the exact crimes are not the same.

Aaron was a vulnerable individual and a very easy target for an overzealous prosecutor. Anthropic is a large company with the money and resources to shield any individual working there from meaningful punishment. No one at anthropic is facing jail time for crimes that should carry a sentence. The crimes are similar and involve theft of copyrighted resources. Aaron’s point with JSTOR is that all that research had already been paid for by American taxpayers. JSTOR was just gatekeeping for profit.

The message from Alsup is clear: if you have money, pay the fine and you can keep doing what you like. If you’re a single person without that, you will be caught and maliciously prosecuted.

And to be clear, Aaron should not have been charged under the circumstances.

But the rich buy “justice”. Us plebes are meant to “face justice”.

They didn't, like, steal the books for ideological reasons or anything. They stole the books so they could then generate equivalents, so people will pay them instead of buy the original books. That's the entire value proposition of AI.

For someone with that much privilege to characterize the alleged infringement of his book’s copyright as having to endure a form of slave labor takes a staggering lack of self-awareness. It’s “you can’t write this shit” levels of obliviousness, and possibly the dumbest, most out-of-touch horseshit I’ve read all year.

And by Stanford types I mean privileged, successful people in general that one can associate with many other highly selective schools and employers.

I am talking about professors taking the work of their students as their own, unpaid of course, and the students can't say much because their future depends on it. So before calling simple copyright infringement "slave labor", they should look at their own community. At least the professors whose work is illegally copied are not forced to do it by the ones taking it.

> any coerced or poorly remunerated work. [1]

[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/slave-labor

The noteworthy thing here, IMO, is the judge seems to have explicitly stated that using legally-acquired works to train AI models falls under fair use.

But the car I bought with the money was totally legal.

If this argument is extrapolated, why should streaming services get the rights to copyrighted works? It sounds like a lot of work.

Hell, why would Pirate Bay be any different than Anthropic in this case? Millions of pieces of copyrighted work, being used as intake rather than sold.

I’d call that the opposite of “suffering”.

  This is not algorithm 

  They think

When anthropic wants to gain money they say "our model hacked and we do not know why (damn it's so good)"

When using publications, "they have been used for learning" (not algorithmic compression)

Etc

They've since bought vast numbers of second hand books and scanned those for training, which appears be legal.

Like when people bring this up as if it's somehow just like acceptable.

It's not at all. That's utter bullshit. The people that run the courts have been bought out. They have no idea what the far-reaching consequences of this is.

The court ruled that it was fair to train on books, but they had to acquire them legally. That's why these companies buy physical books and scan them now.

The Stanford professors in this article opted out of that last case and are trying to get higher payouts.

This is doing a lot of heavy lifting, especially when you consider the scale

> they cannot unscramble the egg without starting over

I would bet they do have copies on their hard-drives (which would probably be legal for them to possess for their own use, if the originals were obtained legally), and that they could simply omit them from their next training run that they probably do at major updates anyway.

No, the lawsuit was because they illegally acquired the books (e.g. downloading them from piracy websites)

These days they are sticking to more legal means like the one you described

It was how they got the books for training: they torrented collections of pirated ebooks. There are Slack messages from executives describing the process as "blatant violation of copyright." They were stealing books and they knew it.

They didn't start buying books legally and scanning them until much later.

I understand exactly what you mean by this, and you are wrong. If they did not copy them, it would not be possible to extricate copyrighted works out of the model like Harry Potter. You can argue against the copyright system, but don't pretend that what they've done is essentially an advanced form of copying. The data is in the weights.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/opinion/claude-pirated-bo...

Damn right too.

> [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

We can argue about whether AI is a net-good for society and if the ends justify the means, but I think it's clear that a lot of people who worked very hard are getting fucked over. Is that okay? Are we really fine with piloting the idea "if you're rich enough you can do anything"?

Because, the reality is that if you or I did this, as many have done before, we would be getting sued to oblivion. Assuming we don't straight-up go to jail. But then AI superscalers do the same thing, on the order of 10,000, and somehow nobody goes to jail. Is that really the kind of message we want to send?

Very soon, all information will be free!

Or do you believe, all books should be free, authors shouldn’t be compensated ever? Why should we compensate programmers or any knowledge worker than if the fruits of their labor should thusly be freely distributed?

Supposedly the trillion dollar company isn’t in the set of “rich” here, but professors are.