The question of what data AI models are trained on, and the legitimacy of that data, is a thorny one. Anthropic found itself defending its use of copyrighted material to train its Claude AI in the US last year, a case that eventually resulted in a ruling that its copyrighted scraping fell under fair use privileges.
However, the company eventually agreed to pay a $1.5 billion settlement in regards to claims that it pirated copies of several author's works. I mention this, because Anthropic has recently taken to X to complain about "industrial-scale distillation attacks" on Claude, perpetrated by what it says are over "24,000 fraudulent accounts" that have generated over 16 million exchanges with the AI chatbot, thereby "extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own model."
