Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?
I'm against Anthropic stealing teacher's work and discouraging them from ever writing again. Some teachers are already saying this (though probably not in California).
I think this is a fantasy. My father cowrote a Springer book about physics. For the effort, he got like $400 and 6 author copies.
Now, you might say he got a bad deal (or the book was bad), but I don't think hundreds of thousands of authors do significantly better. The reality is, people overwhelmingly write because they want to, not because of money.
Writing books is a profession.
Some people write full-time and make a living from it, through book sales, speaking gigs, teaching, or other related work.
Maybe ask Tim O’Reilly what he thinks about this so-called fantasy.
Like I said, Anthropic needs to stop stealing books or face the consequences.