Copyright Fine-Tuning Paper's Headline Claims Are Wrong, Says Memorization Expert A. Feder Cooper

technollama · x · 2026-09-09

A. Feder Cooper publishes a detailed rebuttal to "Alignment Whack-a-Mole" (Liu et al., 2026), which fine-tuned frontier LLMs to extract copyrighted book text and drew strong copyright claims. After review with two senior memorization experts, Cooper concludes the paper's headline claims are incorrect: its memorization metric and elicitation methodology don't hold up — at best seriously overstated, at worst largely wrong — with insufficient detail to tell which. He discloses he raised issues privately in March before going public on responsible-disclosure grounds.

Original post →

More from Safety

Safety channel →