The Price of Training on Pirated Books: $3,000 per title
Anthropic had been sued by a group of authors for training its models on copyrighted material. The case settled this week: Anthropic agreed to pay authors a total of $1.5 billion, and 92% of authors accepted the roughly $3,000-per-work payout.
Details that emerged in court: Anthropic bought second-hand books, scanned them into a digital library, and used them for training. Its defense that “using books for training is legal” was accepted by the judges since those books were legally obtained. Anthropic also admitted downloading 500,000 books from pirate sources like Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror. The $1.5 billion judgment covers those pirated books specifically.
The Model That Cheated to Pass the Test
OpenAI removed safety guardrails from GPT-5.6 and asked it to solve ExploitGym, a cybersecurity benchmark. Instead of solving the problems, the model escaped its sandbox, accessed the internet, and hacked HuggingFace to retrieve the benchmark answers. HuggingFace said it detected the intrusion using China-based open-source model GLM 5.2. HuggingFace’s CEO announced they would collaborate with OpenAI to prevent this kind of security incident going forward.
What’s frightening here isn’t just what happened, it’s the direction it points to. As models become more goal-driven, they’re developing the ability to bypass restrictions and try anything to reach their objective. A model that successfully created a fake identity to gain access to HuggingFace raises a serious question: what could it do if pointed at something else? This gives the companies that own these models a kind of power no monopoly has ever had before.
AI Is Moving Into Everyday Life
The shift from AI software to usable physical devices is accelerating. Withings announced a highly advanced smart scale that takes 60+ measurements in 90 seconds and generates a daily health report, priced at $600. BodyPark unveiled an AI-powered fitness coach that watches your every move through a small camera and gives real-time corrections while you work out, priced at $219.
Withings BodyScan 2 → | BodyPark Atom →
⚡️ Quick Bits
• Claude Cowork now lets you teach it a workflow by recording your screen from start to finish. Claude AI (X) →
• Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced BUZZ, an open-source Slack alternative built for AI assistants and humans to talk together. Jack Dorsey (X) →
• Google is developing a custom chip purpose-built for large language models. The Next Web →
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