>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.

This seems like a "heads I win, tails you lose" type of argument. If Anthropic was pro-piracy I can imagine everyone getting mad that they're flouting law and want to "steal from artists" or whatever.

>and continue doing it

Source? AFAIK they were caught and stopped. That's why there was the recent story about how they were destroying old books to scan them.

> they can afford the penalties and continue doing it.

I thought they could've bought just a single copy of each book and use the content to train their models. In that case, it falls into the fair use doctrine and they wouldn't need to pay the fine. And that will be way less expensive than the $1.5B price tag.

> Just like they want it to be illegal to run local ML inference.

Citation?

In theory none of them actually got the right to train on illegally downloaded books. Anthropic was simply punished for doing it once.

One wonders if they're still doing it.