The US copyright office says this on their website
Uploading or downloading works protected by copyright without the authority of the copyright owner is an infringement of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights of reproduction and/or distribution.
If the company downloaded books without buying them to train their AI, that’s copyright infringement
The US copyright office says this on their website
Their website has zero legal precedence. It is an oversimplification that does not stand up to scrutiny.
The combined act of transmitting the work from uploader to downloader is infringing, but only the uploader’s actions conflict with copyright law. The downloader’s actions do not.