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Comment by sam_lowry_ | Hacker News Reader

Why don't Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Facebook & Co defend Anna's Archive publicly?

Coming out would be a bold move for them.

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.

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.

Of course they are. They have just put on their Swiss Banker suit now and have all sorts of deflection techniques in place such that, of course, "the money has the stamps that says its clean" (when it it really blood money hidden behind a pretty wall).

OpenAI plainly admitted that it is impossible not to do so in a House of Lords inquiry. So, presumably there is no way around it to train models. There is just not enough non-copyrighted data out there.

You mean this one https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/126981/pdf/ where they write "it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials"? That doesn't mean they have to download those materials illegally. For a billion dollars, you can easily buy one legal copy of each book in Anna's Archive and still have some cash left over to run a whole-of-internet scraping operation.

I'm pretty sure we would know if they did that. And we don't.

Plus this is not legal in the EU (and Canada, and ... let's just say the entire rest of the world, and accept that I'll be wrong for one or two smaller countries). Doesn't that matter? Or is only Mistral disallowed from training on copyrighted materials? Je veux ma chaton fat, goddamit!

AI companies legally acquiring books have indeed been in the news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742

And where are you getting the idea that Mistral doesn't train on copyrighted data? There's not a lot of code written by people who've been dead for more than 70 years, but somehow Mistral has been able to release coding models anyway.

But they have been training on copyrighted data since GPT-2 at least. 2019, and that's when it came out, so before that of course.

GPT-2 was trained using data scraped from the web (https://cdn.openai.com/better-language-models/language_model... section 2.1), i.e. copyrighted data provided free of charge to anyone with an internet connection.

You mean very likely the Anna's archive torrent dump because it's MUCH better quality than the general internet and beyond a certain amount of input data (which is a lot, but much less than the internet) the only thing that matters in training is the quality of the data, to the point that now many labs have thousands of people just making and improving essentially school exercises full time?

Hell, I know that for one "lab" (kindof AI lab) since 2020 or so has determined wikipedia quality is dropping fast. It was already dropping slowly before that, but now it's getting bad.

No, I mean the WebText corpus whose construction from 45 million Reddit post with at least 3 karma is described in section 2.1 of the PDF I linked. They did remove all Wikipedia documents.

Anna's Archive didn't exist in 2019.

I wonder if anyone has run the numbers on what the actual cost, both in cash and logistical headache, contacting so many copyright holders would be. That seems like quite the feat to calculate.

There's an established network of intermediaries that can supply a large variety of books for a few dollars apiece, so no need to contact copyright holders directly.

This is very true. As someone with quite the experience with materials published under Penguin, Scholastic, etc. you effectively have a "dictionary attack" on the matter, rather than true "brute force," but that still leaves quite a list to compile to send to each and is easier for larger titles than smaller ones. I wonder how that leads to a bias in what materials get used for training. You are not getting many local self-published books this way.

It is almost like we need a "for use for training" agreement across the board. This would not fix the current issues (at least without substantial work), but going forward would allow for creators (or publishers/rights holders) such as this to designate a work as crawl-able for AI. A robots.txt just for Claude.

Doesn't really matter. The incentive structure to steal clearly exists, so why would they even go through the trouble?

According to the US Chamber of commerce the US exports over 270 billion dollars. https://www.uschamber.com/intellectual-property/unlocking-cr...

Pretty easy to assertain that they don't acquire them legally due to the plethora of evidence and court cases against them. No copyright holder would be sueing them if they knew they sold the works in the first place.

I always wonder why y'all feel the need for these impressive mental gymnastics. You can use the models /and/ think they are trained unethically. Living through the ambiguity without abandoning your ideals completely is a valuable skill these days.

I'm not aware of any successful accusations against OpenAI for illegally obtaining copyrighted material, in contrast to Anthropic, who settled for $3000 per work and then still had to buy legal copies to keep using them (likely for much less).

Instead, the ongoing lawsuits focus on the idea that AI training involves making additional copies, for which they would need a copyright license instead of just one legal copy.

You are kind of right, but you also did not look very hard. They deleted huge datasets in anticipation of lawsuits, at least that much is known. Of course plaintiffs were unable to depose their internal lawyers (who apparently know why they were frantically deleted) due to 'attourney client priviledge' further refusing to provide any kind of transparency. But yeah, I guess they are they are better at covering their tracks and destroying evidence.

Also, as one more example, I find it hard to believe that their models could generate 'Studio Ghibli' style images without training on the movies. There is no licensing deal between them.

I think the real issues here are two-fold:

Firstly, Copyright is very ill equipped to handle these cases. Just because the model is tuned not to output the exact training data does not mean that compressing mostly-copyrighted datasets into a proprietary model is ethical, fair or /should/ be allowed, simply because they might destroy entire livelihoods. If you take those copyrighted works away you are left with, in OpenAIs own words, a cute little experiment.

Secondly, there is absolutely no transparency. Datasets are easily deleted and its impossible to tell what the models have been trained on, especially after fine tuning. Moreover, only the biggest most successfull works would be easily identifiable without the fine tuned model. Once again, sticking it to the little man.

What tosh. It's copywrited material, they pay to access it like everyone else.

I thought the outcome of that was basically it's legal to train on books, but they acquired the books in the wrong way. If they went out and bought copies of them and trained it would have been fine

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

Citation?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49076057 ("Our position on open-weights models (anthropic.com)", 1812 comments)

I see. The following two statements (headlines) stand out:

* We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China

* We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations

That's not quite a ban of local ML inference, but it basically says that he doesn't want companies in China to create their own state of the art models.

No; it's the other headline, mandatory US government certification, that would ban Americans from running their own Chinese large models.

Over the past decade I've noticed on HN the following order of frequency in choice of words, most common to least:

1. Citation

2. Source

3. Reference

Long ago in a career based on original research, I/we ONLY used "reference."

While it is definitely over a decade at this point (over two in fact), some of this likely comes from the term [citation needed], that originated on Wikipedia, as a cynical backhanded response to unsourced claims. It has become a catch-all. Language and how it evolves is a pretty interesting subject.

You're right. Has to be of Wikipedia use origin. Thanks!

OP here. You came to the right conclusion. This is inspired by Wikipedia.

Pretty sure (citation needed) predated wikipedia.

Perhaps, but I'm betting "reference" significantly antedated the Wikipedia-induced ubiquity of "citation [needed]."

I could have written more words, but they would have not conferred more meaning.

>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.

> From the start, Anthropic “ha[d] many places from which” it could have purchased books, but it preferred to steal them to avoid “legal/practice/business slog,” as cofounder and chief executive officer Dario Amodei put it (see Opp. Exh. 27).

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz...

Sounds pretty pro piracy to me.

They stopped because they already had everything in their model anyway.

Yes there are people who are both for and against copyright.

> 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.

That's what they're doing now, when they are established.

But when it was a proof of concept, they were using pirated data.

Just like Spotify did.

Sorry I'm out of the loop: how did Spotify use AA or other pirated data?

I'm not sure if this was ever really confirmed, but it's been said that in the beginning, before they were big enough for record labels to care, they used unlicensed MP3s to build up the library.

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!)

There’s zero liability in a company stating publicly that they support Anna’s Archive. Zero. Free speech protections cover much more egregious statements than that.

I disagree. Anyone with even a hint of standing will sue, and keep suing. As someone who has to work with corporate counsel often, do not say anything you don't have to say. Only say what is absolutely necessary. Free speech protects you from your government. It does not shield you from civil suits, and the US is extremely litigious.

Your freedom of speech is your opponents' lawyers' wet dream. Your publicized support for a known piracy operation will not look very good in the court when you get sued by copyright holders.

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.

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.

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