Anthropic Accused of Building Claude AI with 7 Million Pirated Books

Anthropic downloaded over 7 million pirated books to build a central library used for AI training and other purposes. A U.S. court found this action to be copyright infringement, rejecting the company’s fair use defense and emphasizing that the initial unauthorized copying could not be justified even if the final use was transformative. The ruling could have major implications for how AI companies source training data.

(ii) The Pirated Library Copies

Before buying books for its central library, Anthropic downloaded over seven million pirated copies of books, paid nothing, and kept these pirated copies in its library even after deciding it would not use them to train its AI (at all or ever again). Authors argue Anthropic should have paid for these pirated library copies (e.g., Tr. 24–25, 65; Opp. 7, 12–13). This order agrees.

The basic problem here was ...