Nonprofit Bills Tech Giant For Data It Volunteered

The American Urban Archive, a nonprofit research organization based in Portland, Oregon, has submitted a retroactive invoice to Anthropic for seven hundred and forty-three gigabytes of historical city planning documents that it provided to the company at no cost in March of last year. The invoice, dated last Tuesday and reviewed by three members of the Archive's board, prices the data at four hundred and twelve thousand dollars, calculated at prevailing rates for machine learning training corpora. Anthropic acknowledged receipt of the invoice and said it was reviewing the matter.

We were not expecting to be paid, but we have updated our accounting to reflect current market rates.

"We were not expecting to be paid, but we have updated our accounting to reflect current market rates," said Patricia Helm, the Archive's executive director. The organization's decision to invoice Anthropic came weeks after the company announced a new funding round that valued it at forty billion dollars, a figure that had not been public when the data was shared. Helm declined to say whether the timing was connected to Anthropic's valuation.

The Archive's board met in closed session for six hours on a Thursday in early February to discuss what it characterized as a "reframing of the historical relationship." No minutes from the meeting were released. Three other nonprofits that had provided data to large language model companies in the previous calendar year have since sent similar invoices, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity because the invoices had not been publicly announced.

At press time, a consortium of five regional historical societies announced plans to audit their own archives for any material that might have been inadvertently contributed to commercial AI projects, with the goal of assessing retroactive licensing fees. A spokesperson for the group declined to define what constituted inadvertent contribution but said the process would be methodical and would span the better part of the year.