Anthropic paid $3000USD per work because they pirated works and US copyright law comes with statutory damages completely unrelated to the amount it would have c

Anthropic paid $3000USD per work because they pirated works and US copyright law comes with statutory damages completely unrelated to the amount it would have cost to acquire the same thing legally. The same thing, legally, according to the judge in that lawsuit would have been a purchased (potentially used) copy of the book scanned - i.e. what Anthropic also did after pirating works. It'd be surprising if that would cost even $30USD/work, two orders of magnitude less. $10AUD million doesn't seem sufficient for a competitive set (and as you say they aren't saying it is), but if you told me $50AUD million was enough to build a legal (according to Judge Alsup's interpretation of US law) repository of training data I would not be surprised.