Anthropic Illegally Downloaded Han Kang's Books, Documents Show

U.S. artificial intelligence company Anthropic illegally downloaded digital copies of books by South Korean writers, according to documents reviewed by The Seoul Economic Daily. The company has offered compensation to Han Kang and other Korean authors in line with a U.S. court ruling that ordered it to pay for illegally obtained books.

Reporting by The Seoul Economic Daily found that the list of pirated digital copies Anthropic downloaded between 2021 and 2022 included at least 15 works by Korean writers, among them Han Kang's "Human Acts" and books by Hwang Sok-yong and Shin Kyung-sook.

In filings submitted to the U.S. court between August and November 2024, Anthropic's data partnership team said it was "working on a book purchase agreement with Booxen Korea" and was arranging purchases "in units of thousands (K)" of volumes. Woongjin confirmed to The Seoul Economic Daily that it had signed a contract with Anthropic.

Anthropic was running a program called Project Panama in 2024 under which it bought physical books from around the world and scanned them to obtain high-quality text for training. Korean books appear to have been sold to Anthropic and used for AI training without the knowledge of their authors.

An official in the publishing industry said that while selling books is permitted under the current copyright law, using them to train AI is a separate matter, adding that South Korea still has no rules governing the practice.