Rules For Thee
Anthropic Suddenly Cares Intensely About Intellectual Property After Realizing With Horror That It Accidentally Leaked Claude’s Source Code
That's rich.

By Frank Landymore
Published Apr 3, 2026 8:39 AM EDT

The AI industry largely acts as if it’s above lowly copyright laws — unless, of course, those laws happen to be protecting its own interests.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Anthropic is scrambling to contain a leak of its Claude Code AI model’s source code by issuing a copyright takedown request for more than 8,000 copies of it — a gallingly ironic stance for the company to be taking, considering how it trained its models in the first place.

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Back when Anthropic was still a nascent splinter group formed from former OpenAI researchers, for instance, it needed access to a wealth of high quality training data to build its Claude AI model.

To do that, it first relied on digital books. But it didn’t pay for them or choose only to use ones in the public domain. Instead, it downloaded millions of pirated volumes from the online “shadow library” LibGen. While LibGen doesn’t position itself as a pirate website, Anthropic also downloaded books from a similar hub literally called “Pirate Library Mirror.” (Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann was ebullient about the site’s launch: “just in time!!!” he wrote in a message to employees, along with a link to the site.)

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