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)
> While blocking the piracy of work to train AI
when I read the quote:
> “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,”
That's my mistake.
I went back and read the actual opinion, and while I'm disappointed that training an LLM is fair-use transformative, I'm hopeful about a trial on the subject of the pirated copies. But I'm also worried that the argument seems like it might succeed if such training is "one-shot" without the central library or repository of intermediate copies. And that doesn't seem like a good outcome. But maybe my pessimism here is also misplaced.
But the car I bought with the money was totally legal.