Comment by bastawhiz

That's empirically false. If it was true, there wouldn't be any ongoing litigation about whether it's allowed or not. It's a legal gray area because there specifically isn't a law that says whether you're allowed or not allowed to legally purchase a text and sell information about the text or facts from the text as a service.

In fact, there's exactly nothing illegal about me replacing what Anthropic is doing with books by me personally reading the books and doing the job of the AI with my meat body (unless I'm quoting the text in a way that's not fair use).

But that's not even what's at issue here. Anthropic is essentially banning the equivalent of people buying all the Stephen King books and using them to start a service that specifically makes books designed to replicate Stephen King writing. Claude being about to talk about Pet Sematary doesn't compete with the sale of Pet Sematary. An LLM trained on Stephen King books with the purpose of creating rip-off Stephen King books arguably does.