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).
alistairSH · 2026-10-27 16:06:59 UTC
Distinction without a difference. They pirated books for the purpose of using them to train their models.
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.
kenmacd · 2026-10-27 16:34:18 UTC
I think it's a significant distinction. The original title implies that the training was illegal when the court actually found that the training was fair use. It implies that Anthropic was required to ask the professors for permission to train on their books.
What the actual ruling found was that the professors should have been paid some tens of dollars for 1 copy of their book.
(Whether you agree with it or not is another matter)
lambdaone · 2026-10-27 17:06:49 UTC
Copyright maximalists would argue that even making a copy in RAM would be copyright infringement.
car · 2026-10-27 16:14:51 UTC
Thanks, I concur and have changed the author’s original title to better represent the article.
frangonf · 2026-10-27 16:18:41 UTC
Anthropic allegedly legally learned literature for large llms from illegally laundered illicit LibGen looted Stanford libraries?
jawilson2 · 2026-10-27 16:25:24 UTC
I robbed the bank illegally.
But the car I bought with the money was totally legal.
mkw5053 · 2026-10-27 15:58:48 UTC
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 · 2026-10-27 16:05:26 UTC
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.
car · 2026-10-27 16:18:02 UTC
Thanks, I’ve changed the submission title from the author’s original.
simonw · 2026-10-27 17:13:59 UTC
Anthropic also claimed that those pirated books had not been used to train their models.
They've since bought vast numbers of second hand books and scanned those for training, which appears be legal.
iamleppert · 2026-10-27 16:07:01 UTC
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.
qwerpy · 2026-10-27 16:17:43 UTC
Haha. I appreciate the intent behind this. HN will hate and downvote it of course, but we need constant reminders that we are emotional, take sides just like everyone else, and selectively get outraged about things.
bulbar · 2026-10-27 16:27:41 UTC
It's not the information itself that get sold, but the specific composition of information arranged as a book. Work went into it and people who do it sell that rightfully.
_doctor_love · 2026-10-27 16:48:50 UTC
Can I have your credit card and social please? Pretty sure that information wants to be free, too.
kemotep · 2026-10-27 16:54:38 UTC
Why couldn’t they pay for the book to get that knowledge then?
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?
whywhywhywhy · 2026-10-27 16:07:49 UTC
They did the same with literally everyone's data. Is it supposed to matter more because a "Stanford professor's" work was included?
piltdownman · 2026-10-27 16:11:39 UTC
They were already eligible for damages as per the class-action settlement, but several Stanford professors actively opted out of the blanket class-action settlement to pursue Anthropic individually for higher damages.
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...
the cfaa is extremely broad, but it doesn't cover downloading books from libgen and the like. there is no alleged unauthorized system access (in this case).
a3w · 2026-10-27 16:43:13 UTC
does n.b. mean nota bene?
sillysaurusx · 2026-10-27 17:11:54 UTC
Aaron broke into a network closet and actively circumvented MAC address bans. The comparison isn't meaningful. Anthropic downloaded theirs from libgen:
> 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.
troupo · 2026-10-27 17:16:48 UTC
The same libgen which is illegal in the US and whose sources include those obtained by Aaron Swarz? That libgen?
sillysaurusx · 2026-10-27 17:37:25 UTC
Yes. This isn't even controversial. Aaron broke into a network to obtain papers. The CFAA is applied when someone breaks into a network. Downloading from libgen isn't breaking into a network.
malfist · 2026-10-27 17:36:57 UTC
Why isn't the comparison meaningful? Aaron broke the law and circumvented protections, Anthropic broke the law and circumvented protections. Regardless of if Aaron broke into a network closet or anthropic broke DRM, anthropic took explicit action to receive knowingly stolen goods.
orochimaaru · 2026-10-27 17:32:17 UTC
Thank you for pointing this out. I always make this comparison when saying these people are thieves and should be subject to the same prosecution.
But the rich buy “justice”. Us plebes are meant to “face justice”.
DannyPage · 2026-10-27 17:37:23 UTC
It seems like you believe it was wrong for Swartz to have been prosecuted. If doesn't seem like it would serve justice to prosecute other people in the same way. Doing the wrong thing now just because a wrong thing happened in the past is not how a just society operates.
linuxftw · 2026-10-27 16:15:53 UTC
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.
thephyber · 2026-10-27 17:25:11 UTC
US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
> [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.
bushido · 2026-10-27 16:21:00 UTC
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 · 2026-10-27 16:25:13 UTC
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?
karmakurtisaani · 2026-10-27 16:51:48 UTC
Torrenting just scales better, I think it's simple as that.
pier25 · 2026-10-27 16:42:57 UTC
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:
That professor saying that the use of work he already produced amounts to "slave labor"... copyright infringement is substantially different than slavery.
thephyber · 2026-10-27 17:15:41 UTC
"Slave labor" doesn't always refer to chattel slavery.
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 · 2026-10-27 16:55:03 UTC
Humanity is suffering from large scale distillation attack from Anthropic.
lambdaone · 2026-10-27 17:08:36 UTC
That is an excellent way of looking at things - if a distillation attack against a model is bad, so should be a distillation attack against mankind. I'd argue that this suggests the former should be legal, rather than the latter becoming illegal.
pluc · 2026-10-27 16:57:19 UTC
Didn't it train Claude on illegally obtained everything?
lokar · 2026-10-27 17:04:47 UTC
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 · 2026-10-27 17:05:28 UTC
The primary value of a LLM is automated intellectual property laundering.
NelsonMinar · 2026-10-27 17:30:16 UTC
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.
Comments
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).
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.
What the actual ruling found was that the professors should have been paid some tens of dollars for 1 copy of their book.
(Whether you agree with it or not is another matter)
But the car I bought with the money was totally legal.
They've since bought vast numbers of second hand books and scanned those for training, which appears be legal.
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?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/opinion/claude-pirated-bo...
Damn right too.
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...
> 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.
But the rich buy “justice”. Us plebes are meant to “face justice”.
> [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.
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.
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?
As for the training being fair use, this is still disputed:
https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-ma...
> any coerced or poorly remunerated work. [1]
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/slave-labor