Where I draw the line is asking Claude to label training data. I don’t do this.
I ask it questions about large models like big MoEs all the time. I’ve never had it refuse a question, but I would expect it to refuse sometimes.
For training data from existing models I just get open models to spill their guts. It’s fine
In industry we train employees to not reveal proprietary information.
I think it would be easier to do this for a model than a lot of employees
Strangely I do that quite often. When my personal agent fails at a browser task, I have Claude browse the page and rebuild it as an eval and then run an iteration loop in Claude code. Just does it to prompt Deepseek.
> Where I draw the line is asking Claude to label training data. I don’t do this.
Why draw any line? Anthropic doesn't. They actively take the world's intellectual property, don't pay for it, and put it behind a paywall.
> but I would expect it to refuse sometimes.
Why? Anthropic's dream is to be exempted from copyright altogether. They've been trying to achieve exactly that:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/02/anthropic...
Given they want no restrictions on them, why should there be any restriction on anyone else?
One of my points of my ethical framework is that IP is valuable and should not be stolen.
Another way of saying is that hard work that advances the state of the art should be rewarded. Patents should exist.
I’m sure they are watching what I’m doing and would retaliate via service cut off and legal action if I crossed it egregiously and they found out.
I would do the same thing if a user or employee did this to my IP.
I don’t completely buy the argument of web scraping being an IP violation.
I don’t send my core ip in an email to my main competitors and I don’t post it on the internet.
> One of my points of my ethical framework is that IP is valuable and should not be stolen.
Anthropic's business model is premised on intellectual property theft. They take it without paying for it.
You are compromising your ethical framework by using Anthropic's products.
Downvoted after providing evidence.
You've provided none
It's right here - you can't see it due to being downvoted.
I asked Claude to research this one and it turned up an interesting point. Pirated books got into the Pile and Anthropic paid 3k per book. Worth noting if anyone still uses the Pile.
[Claude researched, not verified]
In October 2020, developer Shawn Presser converted the Bibliotik pirate tracker into Books3 (196,640 books) and hosted it on The Eye, aiming to give everyone what OpenAI had with its secret Books1 and Books2. EleutherAI then folded Books3 into The Pile, distributed via Hugging Face and GitHub, and it went on to train Meta's LLaMA, EleutherAI's Pythia, and BloombergGPT. In August 2023, Alex Reisner of The Atlantic exposed its contents, and Maria Fredenslund's Danish Rights Alliance forced takedowns at The Eye, Hugging Face, and EleutherAI. A year later, Andrea Bartz (The Lost Night), Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse), and Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief) filed Bartz v. Anthropic before Judge William Alsup, accusing Anthropic of using Books3, LibGen, and PiLiMi to train Claude; the case settled for $1.5 billion, about $3,000 per work.
Some thoughts on this.
The Pile was created by high school students. I was impressed how good it was when it came out given the team and how many resources they had.
Including 200k pirated books seems like a problem. It should be removed. If I was an author, I would be concerned by a process that allows this much content to be effectively published with no filter on the internet.
I personally think there is a lower bar for researchers and high school students to clean datasets used for research or class projects given that there is no commercial harm and cleaning huge datasets takes engineering resources that not everyone has.
In this case, it looks like it was removed by https://huggingface.co/collections/common-pile/common-pile-v...
Companies that commercialize the data should have a higher bar because they have more resources. It seems like Anthropic paid $1.5B for not cleaning the data before releasing a model based on it.
For historical reference, here is a magnet link for the full Pile. From an ethical perspective, this is ethical because model training should not be monopolised by the incumbent companies who already got access to this data.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:0d366035664fdf51cfbe9f733953ba325776e667&dn=EleutherAI_ThePile_v1&tr=https%3A%2F%2Facademictorrents.com%2Fannounce.php&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce
Oh I can see (poor rephrase):
> That's very click baitey. Do you have an argument or evidence for why?
That's very click baitey. Do you have an argument or evidence for why?
Evidence of what? That Anthropic commits massive intellectual property theft?
Sure, here's some: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo
[flagged]
We were never this absolutist about intellectual property when individuals were the perpetrators. I don’t feel morally entitled to criticise Big AI for doing what individuals have done for centuries.
No? The United States disagrees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
https://www.thedailybeast.com/aaron-swartzs-unbending-prosec...
If an individual had done what Anthropic continues to do then they would be jailed for life.
> Given they want no restrictions on them, why should there be any restriction on anyone else?
Because corporations are not moral agents; they're economic agents. This arrangement would be great for shareholder, nothing more.
>> Where I draw the line is asking Claude to label training data. I don’t do this.
> Why draw any line? Anthropic doesn't. They actively take the world's intellectual property, don't pay for it, and put it behind a paywall.
I know a lot of silicon valley founders think like this. I personally don't think that just because someone else violated a boundary makes it okay to do it.