I mean, you'd think as a fellow grifter Altman would understand that because he's the same fucking way.
He started with books3, it was known it was pirated, it was known it DRM had been stripped from ebooks (a federal crime in the US).
He started his company with a dataset of more than questionable provenance and he did not pay a dime for access to it.
books3 is a well known corpus that was built from the entirety of the Bibliotik private tracker for ebooks. It's a fucking pirate website with piracy as the explicit goal as well as tools to allow you to strip DRM from ebooks.
Now, piracy itself isn't the issue here, it's that somehow when it's a massive corporation doing it, suddenly it's okay to make obscene amounts of money from piracy. When the rich steal shit and make a mint off of it, it's fine. But when little people do it? Fuck em, sue em and prosecute them for all they're worth.
Rules don't apply to them, and they know it.