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Anthropic broke the law by using pirated books to train its AI and agrees to create $1.5 billion fund to compensate authors

AI upstart Anthropic has agreed to create a $1.5 billion fund it will use to compensate authors whose works it used to train its models without seeking or securing permission.

News of the settlement emerged late last week in a filing [PDF] in the case filed by three authors – Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson – who claimed that Anthropic illegally used their works.

We’re going to see a lot more of this. AI companies wIll create ‘slush funds’

Anthropic admitted to having bought millions of physical books and then digitizing them. The company also downloaded millions of pirated books from the notorious Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror troves of stolen material.

The company nonetheless won part of the case, on grounds that scanning books is fair use and using them to create “transformative works” – the output of an LLM that doesn’t necessarily include excerpts from the books – was also OK. But the decision also found Anthropic broke the law by knowingly ingesting pirated books.

Plaintiffs intended to pursue court action over those pirated works, but the filing details a proposed settlement under which Anthropic will create a $1.5 billion fund which values each pirated book it used for training at $3,000. Anthropic also agreed to destroy the pirated works.

In the filing, counsel observes that this is the largest ever copyright recovery claim to succeed in the USA and suggest it “will set a precedent of AI companies paying for their use of alleged pirated websites.”

This settlement is indeed significant given that several other major AI companies – among them Perplexity AI and OpenAI – face similar suits. It may also set a precedent that matters in Anthropic’s dispute with Reddit over having scraped the forum site’s content to feed into its training corpus.

The filing asks the court to approve the settlement, a request judges rarely overrule.

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South Korea’s Dangerous Shift to Communism: Prosecutors Abolished, Media and Data Reports Brought Under State Control, Opposition Jailed

On September 7, President Lee Jae-myung’s administration announced a radical reorganization plan that, according to critics, dismantles prosecutorial independence, centralizes media oversight, and places national statistics under direct political command.

Officials describe this as “streamlining government” and “reducing fiscal burdens,” but many observers warn it may represent the construction of a one-party system, resembling patterns historically seen in communist regimes.

Please find below a detailed report that I have prepared in English for your review and consideration. The original Korean news source is also included for verification.

The source article from the Korean media:
MBC News: “Abolition of Prosecutors’ Office, Division of the Finance Ministry, Abolition of the Broadcasting Commission… Lee Jae-myung Government Reshapes the State”

A Radical Overhaul in the Name of “Efficiency”

On September 7, the administration of President Lee Jae-myung unveiled a sweeping government reorganization plan that would significantly alter South Korea’s legal, economic, and media institutions. Officials claim the plan is designed to “streamline government” and “reduce fiscal burdens.” Critics, however, argue that it risks concentrating power in ways that mirror authoritarian systems.

At its core, the plan calls for abolishing the Prosecutors’ Office and replacing it with two politically dependent bodies:

The Prosecution Office (공소청) under the Ministry of Justice, handling indictments.

The Serious Crimes Investigation Agency (중수청) under the Ministry of Interior, handling investigations.

This change eliminates the semi-independent prosecutorial system and consolidates both indictment and investigation within the executive branch.

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Fury over fundraiser for career criminal who brutally murdered Ukrainian on North Carolina train

An online fundraiser designed to support a career criminal who brutally murdered a Ukrainian girl onboard a train in North Carolina has sparked fury online.

Decarlos Brown Jr., 35, is facing first-degree murder charges for stabbing Iryna Zarutska, 23, onboard a South End light rail train in Charlotte on August 22.

Shocking surveillance footage from the scene showed him watching Zarutska for some time after she sat in the seat in front of him, eventually taking out what appeared to be a blade from his pocket. 

He then stood up and loomed over the 23-year-old, swinging the knife at her as she sat with her phone.

Brown was then seen leaving a trail of blood throughout the train as other passengers appeared not to realize the killing that had taken place.

A Daily Mail review of police records has since revealed that the 35-year-old has spent most of his life in and out of prison.

He was even out on bail and was awaiting trial for misusing 911 when he allegedly stabbed the Ukrainian refugee.

But a GoFundMe insists Brown was just the victim of a broken judicial system, as it raised money for his legal funds.

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Russia strikes Ukraine cabinet offices in unprecedented deadly assault with over 800 drones

Russia hit Ukraine’s capital with drone and missiles Sunday in the largest aerial attack on the country since the war began, killing at least two people and leaving smoke rising from the roof of a key government building.

Russia attacked Ukraine with 805 drones and decoys, officials said.

Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Air Force, confirmed to The Associated Press that Sunday’s attack was the largest Russian drone strike since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.

Russia also launched 13 missiles of various types.

Ukraine shot down and neutralized 747 drones and 4 missiles, according to a statement from the Air Force.

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Warning one third of the US economy is ALREADY in recession… here are the next states to fall

Leading economist Mark Zandi has warned that a third of the US is already in or at high risk of going into a recession. 

Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, revealed that states making up nearly a third of America’s GDP – including Virginia, Connecticut and Delaware – are in dangerous territory.

‘States experiencing recessions are spread across the country, but the broader DC area stands out due to government job cuts,’ Zandi wrote on X.

It comes after President Donald Trump and Elon Musk went on a firing spree earlier this year in an attempt to reduce the cost of the federal workforce. 

States representing another third of the economy are holding steady – such as Hawaii, New York and California – and a final third are still growing. 

‘Southern states are generally the strongest, but their growth is slowing,’ he explained. 

South Carolina, Alabama, Kentucky and Louisiana all made the list of states still growing economically. 

‘California and New York, which together account for over a fifth of US GDP, are holding their own, and their stability is crucial for the national economy to avoid a downturn,’ Zandi added. 

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Age Verification Company Exposes User Data, Reinforcing Privacy Fears Over Digital ID Systems

A company tasked with confirming users’ ages before they access adult content may be compromising their privacy by leaking detailed browsing data, according to a report by the nonprofit AI Forensics.

The group’s investigation highlights serious flaws in how some sites are complying with growing online age-check requirements, raising new concerns about surveillance and data exposure under the guise of protecting children.

France’s law requires that users’ identities remain concealed, not just from adult websites, but from the age verification services themselves.

Known as “double anonymity,” this standard is meant to ensure that those performing the verification process have no knowledge of which websites users are visiting or what content they attempt to access.

But AI Forensics found that AgeGO, one of the verification systems in active use, doesn’t meet those expectations.

Instead, AgeGO’s system reportedly transmits precise details about the user’s activity, including the URL of the video being viewed and the name of the website.

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Tim Kaine’s Constitutional blasphemy

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) this week warned the American people that a Trump nominee for a State Department position was an extremist, cut from the same cloth as the Iranian mullahs and religious extremists.

Riley Barnes, nominated to serve as assistant secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor, revealed his dangerous proclivities to Kaine in his opening statement when he said that “all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our creator; not from our laws, not from our governments.”

It was a line that should be familiar to any citizen — virtually ripped from the Declaration of Independence, our founding document that is about to celebrate its 250th anniversary.

Yet Kaine offered a very surprising response in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes,” he said. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia (sic) law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. They do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.”

The idea that laws “come from the government” is the basis of what is called “legal positivism,” which holds that the legitimacy and authority of laws are not based on God or natural law but rather legislation and court decisions.

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A National Asset in Troubled Times

When he was running for president in 2024, Donald Trump promised that he would shut down the Ukraine war shortly after taking office, if not before he moved into the White House. He also promised that he would not start any more wars and would markedly improve U.S. relations with Russia. Very importantly, he engineered a ceasefire in Gaza on January 19, 2025, the day before he was sworn in again as president, which provided hope that the Gaza genocide might come to an end.

But after that auspicious start, President Trump has failed to deliver on his promises. The Ukraine war and the Gaza genocide rage on. Trump, like President Biden before him, is fully complicit in a genocide. On top of that, the United States directly attacked Iran on June 22, 2025, a move Biden had the good sense to avoid. Most observers think it is only a matter of time before Trump and Israel attack Iran again. Relations between Moscow and Washington have improved a bit, but remain antagonistic at their core, while U.S.-India relations, which had improved greatly over the past twenty-five years, have recently turned poisonous. Finally, there is an ever-present possibility in East Asia that China and the United States could get into a shooting match.

All of this is to say we live in not just troubled times, but dangerous times. Remember that we live in a nuclear world. Sadly, there is no easy way to fix the many problems facing us. But we can minimize the chances of making bad situations worse, and maybe even make major inroads in solving some of the key problems we face. Additionally, we can maximize our chances of creating further disasters.

The best way to make progress of this sort is to openly debate foreign policy issues, so that critics of the conventional wisdom or government policy can have their say. Media institutions are hugely important in fostering this kind of debate, which is why freedom of the press is so important in the United States. It allows critics to make their views known to large numbers of people and it provides legitimacy. Critics of existing policy are not always right, but sometimes they speak truth to power and help us avoid or correct big mistakes.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media in the United States have become much less effective since the Cold War ended. It has become increasingly difficult for dissenters to get a platform in prominent media outlets, and mainstream media outlets often seem to speak with one voice on the big foreign policy issues of the day. This situation is not healthy, and it helps explains why America’s standing in the world has declined over the past three decades.

Thankfully, alternative media outlets have proliferated in recent years, making it possible for critics of US foreign policy to make their voices heard. Indeed, growing numbers of concerned citizens and policy analysts pay as much attention, if not more, to alternative media sites than the mainstream media.

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Neo-Nazi leader Thomas Sewell’s henchman exposed: How a police officer’s son rose through Australia’s far-right ranks

Thomas Sewell might be the current face of neo-Nazism in Australia but wherever his bald head pops up inciting racial hatred it is likely right-hand man Nathan Bull will be standing beside him.

When Bull first emerged on the far-right scene a couple of years ago he was a baby-faced stirrer with a penchant for offensive T-shirts and juvenile antics. He is now a 23-year-old father and his childish smirk has gone. 

Sewell is the leader of the National Socialist Network (NSN) and has long courted media attention, while Bull – the son of a Victorian policeman – has generally been seen as an insignificant young offsider. 

That changed last weekend when Bull was part of the NSN raiding party who stormed Camp Sovereignty at Melbourne‘s Kings Domain park, an Aboriginal sacred site near the Shrine of Remembrance.

Suddenly, Bull was seen on news website and television bulletins around the country snarling through a mouthguard as he stood next to Sewell, who appeared to be throwing a punch at a campsite occupier. 

The encampment was born of the Black GST Movement, which campaigns for an end to genocide, the acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignty and making treaties with Indigenous Australians.

About 30 men dressed in black invaded Camp Sovereignty after an anti-immigration rally held under the March for Australia banner in Melbourne’s central business district on Sunday.

The intruders were filmed trampling an Aboriginal flag amid a violent scuffle in which Camp Sovereignty occupiers were allegedly punched, kicked and hit with a pole. 

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The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists

There are two types of war correspondents. The first type does not attend press conferences. They do not beg generals and politicians for interviews. They take risks to report from combat zones. They send back to their viewers or readers what they see, which is almost always diametrically opposed to official narratives. This first type, in every war, is a tiny minority.

Then there is the second type, the inchoate blob of self-identified war correspondents who play at war. Despite what they tell editors and the public, they have no intention of putting themselves in danger. They are pleased with the Israeli ban on foreign reporters into Gaza. They plead with officials for background briefings and press conferences. They collaborate with their government minders who impose restrictions and rules that keep them out of combat. They slavishly disseminate whatever they are fed by officials, much of which is a lie, and pretend it is news. They join little jaunts arranged by the military — dog and pony shows — where they get to dress up and play soldier and visit outposts where everything is controlled and choreographed.

The mortal enemy of these poseurs are the real war reporters, in this case, Palestinian journalists in Gaza. These reporters expose them as toadies and sycophants, discrediting nearly everything they disseminate. For this reason, the poseurs never pass up a chance to question the veracity and motives of those in the field. I watched these snakes do this repeatedly to my colleague Robert Fisk.

When war reporter Ben Anderson arrived at the hotel where journalists covering the war in Liberia were encamped — in his words getting “drunk” at bars “on expenses,” having affairs and exchanging “information rather than actually going out and getting information” — his image of war reporters took a huge hit.

“I thought, finally, I’m amongst my heroes,” Anderson recalls. “This is where I’ve wanted to be for years. And then me and the cameraman I was with — who knew the rebels very well — he took us out for about three weeks with the rebels. We came back to Monrovia. The guys in the hotel bar said, ‘Where have you been? We thought you’d gone home.’ We said, ‘We went out to cover the war. Isn’t that our job? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’”

“The romantic view I had of foreign correspondents was suddenly destroyed in Liberia,” he went on. “I thought, actually, a lot of these guys are full of shit. They’re not even willing to leave the hotel, let alone leave the safety of the capital and actually do some reporting.”

You can see an interview I did with Anderson here.

This dividing line, which occurred in every war I covered, defines the reporting on the genocide in Gaza. It is not a divide of professionalism or culture. Palestinian reporters expose Israeli atrocities and implode Israeli lies. The rest of the press does not.

Palestinian journalists, targeted and assassinated by Israel, pay — as many great war correspondents do — with their lives, although in far greater numbers. Israel has murdered 245 journalists in Gaza by one count and more than 273 by another. The goal is to shroud the genocide in darkness. No war I covered comes close to these numbers of dead. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed more journalists “than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.” Journalists in Palestine leave wills and recorded videos to be read or played at their death.

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