In my observation, Snopes is rather conservative in their speculations when attempting to confirm a claim, unless the evidence is rather overwhelming and/or substantiated by actual documentation (of course). They have a reputation that's nearly as old as public-access Internet itself. Personally, I've followed-up on crazy-ass Internet claims via Snopes for decades. I'm convinced they are reputable.
That said, I did a bit more digging. Seems like
Futurism has researched this phenomenon, and
the Washington Post has, as well. Apparently,
Anthropic was forced to pay a $1.5 million settlement to authors, though a judge ruled that buying, scanning, and then shredding the books (ostensibly to train their AI models) was "transformative" and so a protected activity. It appears the AI companies were still plagiarizing the works of the authors to add content to their LLMs, regardless of the physical end-state of the books.
The WaPo article is hidden behind a paywall and I'm not a subscriber, so I can't read their article. But it's referenced by Futurism in theirs.
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