Comment by riskable

Exactly! If Anthropic is guilty of copyright infringement for the mere act of downloading copyrighted books then so is Google, Microsoft (Bing), DuckDuckGo, etc. Every search engine that exists downloads pirated material every day. They'd all be guilty.

Not only that but all of us are guilty too because I'm positive we've all clicked on search results that contained copyrighted content that was copied without permission. You may not have even known it was such.

Remember: Intent is irrelevant when it comes to copyright infringement! It's not that kind of law.

Intent can guide a judge when they determine damages but that's about it.