It was what's commonly called illegal piracy on a commercial basis and gigantic scale. That normally leads to hefty prison sentences. I've always been against this legal classification and think piracy should be allowed for non-commercial purposes or at least only be considered a very minor crime, but in the present example the piracy was clearly for commercial gains, a company using the illegally obtained material to create essential features of commercial products.

Agreements with publishers after the fact shouldn't even count, particularly since all copyright holders weren't consulted. I wouldn't have given my permission, for example.

It's important to stress that the media were not legally acquired by most US frontier AI companies if not all of them.