But Anna's Archive is clearly working to support AI developers, another noted, pointing out that Anna's Archive promotes the sale of “high-speed access” to “enterprise-level” LLM data, including “unreleased collections.” Anyone can donate “tens of thousands” to gain such access, the archive's webpage suggests, and any interested AI researchers can get in touch to discuss “how we can work together.”
“AI may not be their original/primary motivation, but they are apparently involved in facilitating piracy maxxing in AI labs,” a third commenter suggested.
Meanwhile, some on Reddit worried that Anna's Archive might have ruined itself by deleting the data. To them, it seemed like the archive was “just making itself a target” after watching the Internet Archive struggle to survive a legal attack from record labels that ended in a confidential settlement last year.
“I'm furious at AA for putting this target on their own back,” one Redditor wrote in a post, stating that “this Spotify hacking will only ruin the actual important literary archive.”
As Anna's Archive's fan base grew, a conspiracy even emerged that the Archive was only “doing it for the AI brothers, who are the ones paying the bills behind the scenes” to keep the Archive running.
Ars could not immediately reach Anna's Archive to comment on users' fears or Spotify's investigation.
On Reddit, one user took solace in the fact that the archive is “designed to withstand deletion,” which may prevent legal action from ever truly destroying the archive.
“The domain and such may be gone, of course, but the core software and associated data can resurface again and again,” the user explained.
But not everyone was convinced that Anna's Archive could survive the shameless torrenting of so much Spotify data.
“This is like saying the Titanic is unsinkable,” the user warned, suggesting that Anna's Archive could lose donations if Spotify-powered takedowns continually frustrate downloads over time. “Sure, in theory, data can certainly come up over and over again, but doing that every time requires money and resources, which are finite. How many times are people willing to do this before they just give up?”
This story has been updated with Spotify's statement.
