Anthropic paying $1.5 billion in fines for downloading Anna's Archive established a moat. They want it to be illegal to pirate books: they can afford the penalties and continue doing it. Just like they want it to be illegal to run local ML inference.

Those are all law-abiding organizations, which AA is not.

INB4: "Here is one time one of those organizations broke the law". Don't go there, absolute lowest level of conversation.

No gain, all liability. Easier to cut them a check for access to training data and say nothing. Unless legal discovery was performed, the outside world would never know, and the payment records would roll off corporate records through a record retention schedule eventually. Could obfuscate it as a contractor consulting fee ("knowledge management subject matter expert") if you wanted to get tricky, depending on the risk appetite of whomever would receive the funds.

(not legal advice!)

I'm pretty sure[0] they're all using shadow libraries, and saying things in favor of them would increase their liability.

Furthermore, every pirate wants to be an admiral. None of the big tech companies are actually in favor of any amount of copyright reform. They never have been. There is a huge gulf between "personally benefitting from copyright theft" and "actually wants to legalize the theft". Anthropic still believes they deserve to be paid for their models, they just have this delusion in their head that doing a bunch of computation on stolen data is equivalent to actual human creativity.

[0] OpenAI, Anthropic and Facebook have been shown in court to be using shadow libraries, I don't know about Google.