>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.