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AI’s Memorization Crisis

On Tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models—OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok—have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained on, and can reproduce long excerpts from those books.

In fact, when prompted strategically by researchers, Claude delivered the near-complete text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Great Gatsby, 1984, and Frankenstein, in addition to thousands of words from books including The Hunger Games and The Catcher in the Rye. Varying amounts of these books were also reproduced by the other three models. Thirteen books were tested.

This phenomenon has been called “memorization,” and AI companies have long denied that it happens on a large scale. In a 2023 letter to the U.S. Copyright Office, OpenAI said that “models do not store copies of the information that they learn from.” Google similarly told the Copyright Office that “there is no copy of the training data—whether text, images, or other formats—present in the model itself.”  Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, and others have made similar claims. (None of the AI companies mentioned in this article agreed to my requests for interviews.)