New Delhi, Feb. 16 -- Anastasia Stasenko, founder of European AI lab Pleias, has bluntly characterised the way large AI companies train their models on copyrighted data as "stealing". Speaking to HT ahead of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, Stasenko argued for "sovereign", locally run systems over the cloud-dependent models built by US tech giants.

"It's stealing, okay? It's not an opinion, it's just a fact," Stasenko said, referring to recent copyright disputes involving companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Her comments reflect a growing global debate over whether scraping books, articles and websites to train AI systems constitutes "fair use" or copyright infringement.

Stasenko is among the international founders invit...