“Dr. Amodei admitted that Anthropic ‘ha[d] many places from which’ it could have legally purchased these copyrighted works for training, but instead torrented them because doing so was faster and free.”
They knew the source was sketchy, said so in writing, and did it anyway because buying the books cost money. Now the publishers are suing the founders personally instead of the corporate shell. The exhibits are their own chat logs. Every startup that treats legal risk as a line item should read the part where the internal jokes become discovery.