The artists had actual laws to protect them, not just vaguely enforceable terms of service. And look where that got them. I have zero empathy for the huge company getting a taste of their own medicine.
They are almost certainly paying orders of magnitude less than a billion dollars. According to another comment, they instead buy tokens resold from subsidized subscription accounts, which is against Anthropic's TOS.
Well, anthropic can just catch these and cancel their subscription - what's the problem?
It's almost like websites also have their robots.txt files that anthropic blatantly ignored. What's the problem, that now a US company is getting out-venture capitalismed by a Chinese company?
>> I'm sure all the artists and creators they stole from had stipulations too.
> Anthropic paid one billion in a copyright settlement.
Because a judge determined Anthropic was engaged in piracy.
> That's a lot of money considering they never distributed the pirated books they trained on.
This is "fruit of the poisonous tree" as it were. Distributing content derived from pirated content ("pirated books they trained on") is why Anthropic had to pay what they paid.
> Nowadays they buy copies of books, train on them, and then destroy them.
There is a case one could make that this practice could be seen as unauthorized redistribution of a derivative work intended to deprive copyright holders of legitimate revenue.
There no hypocrisy in saying that it is unethical and immoral to rob a former robber, especially if he was already harshly punished for his crime. Two wrongs don't make a right. I can't believe have to even point this out.
They were not "harshly punished". As always, they get slap on the wrist, proceed to benefit from the crime and that is it. You and I would be harshly punished. Anthropic was not.
1.5 billion dollars are not a "slap on the wrist". That's a huge amount of money. It exceeded the amount they would have legally paid for those books by orders of magnitude.
> 1.5 billion dollars are not a "slap on the wrist".
It is when the wrist being slapped raised $30 billion and had a valuation $380 billion[0] in the month of February 2026. Some would call the $1.5 billion piracy settlement "cost of doing business." And they would be right in this case.
> It exceeded the amount they would have legally paid for those books by orders of magnitude.
Making the argument that a piracy settlement exceeds what a corporation would have paid for each individual book pirated, when said distribution exceeds individual copies of each book "by orders of magnitude" (your words, not mine) is disingenuous at best.
It's fucking nothing. The copyright industry used to threaten individual citizens with $250,000 fines per violation for willful commercial infringement. Where are they now?
Why aren't these big tech CEOs in cuffs with rifles pointed at their faces while SWAT seizes all of their computers?
