I have written 12 books (not counting translations of particularly popular works), so I expected to find some works of mine on the Anthropic setllement website. Though I have known about this settlement action for a while now, I put off thinking about it until I got an official email from a law office just last week. That made me bite the bullet and go digging through the data pile.

You probably already know BIML’s distinction between HOW machines (normal computer programs) and WHAT machines (machines built by ML over an often immense WHAT pile). We talk all about this in our LLM risks report. Lots of risks are tied up in the very nature of the WHAT pile. Poison in the WHAT pile is bad. Racism, xenophobia, and sexism in the WHAT pile is bad. It turns out that one excellent approach to ML risk management is to compile a nice clean WHAT pile to train on.

Back to our Anthropic story. Much to my surprise, the Anthropic WHAT pile only had seven of my authored books on its list of stolen things—and it didn’t have the most famous of my works on it at all. Weird.

Is that good? Well, not really. You see, I would prefer that AI/ML systems encapsulated in LLMs would understand and incorporate the concepts in my very best work, Software Security. Apparently they don’t. I am torn about this as an author. I don’t want to see my stuff outright stolen and my copyrights infringed. But I also don’t want LLMs to be wrong and under-informed about software security—a field I helped to define from the very beginning.

It’s complicated, huh?