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To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
This is sad for open source AI, piracy for the purpose of model training should also be fair use because otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so. There is no way to buy billions of books just for model training, it simply can't happen.
This implies training models is some sort of right.
Wait so they raised all that money just to give it to publishers? Can only imagine the pitch, yes please give us billions of dollars. We are going to make a huge investment like paying of our lawsuits.
From the article: > Although the payment is enormous, it is small compared with the amount of money that Anthropic has raised in recent years. This month, the start-up announced that it had agreed to a deal that brings an additional $13 billion into Anthropic’s coffers. The start-up has raised a total of more than $27 billion since its founding in 2021.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article: > Although the payment is enormous, it is small compared with the amount of money that Anthropic has raised in recent years. This month, the start-up announced that it had agreed to a deal that brings an additional $13 billion into Anthropic’s coffers. The start-up has raised a total of more than $27 billion since its founding in 2021.
maybe I’m bad at math but paying >5% of your capital raised for a single fine doesn’t seem great from a business perspective
To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
I wonder what Aaron Swartz would think if he lived to see the era of libgen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is related to scalable mode training, however. Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable. And don't forget about the cost of 1) finding 2) purchasing 3) processing and 4) recycling that volume of books.
> Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable. That's how Google Books, the Internet Archive, and Amazon (their book preview feature) operated before ebooks were common. It's not scalable-in-a-garage but perfectly scalable for a commercial operation.
The books that are destroyed in scanning are a small minority compared to the millions discarded by libraries every year for simply being too old or unpopular.
Wait so they raised all that money just to give it to publishers? Can only imagine the pitch, yes please give us billions of dollars. We are going to make a huge investment like paying of our lawsuits.
1. A Settlement Fund of at least $1.5 Billion: Anthropic has agreed to pay a minimum of $1.5 billion into a non-reversionary fund for the class members. With an estimated 500,000 copyrighted works in the class, this would amount to an approximate gross payment of $3,000 per work. If the final list of works exceeds 500,000, Anthropic will add $3,000 for each additional work.
2. Destruction of Datasets: Anthropic has committed to destroying the datasets it acquired from LibGen and PiLiMi, subject to any legal preservation requirements.
3. Limited Release of Claims: The settlement releases Anthropic only from past claims of infringement related to the works on the official "Works List" up to August 25, 2025. It does not cover any potential future infringements or any claims, past or future, related to infringing outputs generated by Anthropic's AI models.
This is sad for open source AI, piracy for the purpose of model training should also be fair use because otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so. There is no way to buy billions of books just for model training, it simply can't happen.