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Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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Technology
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These books were purchased by them before being destroyed in the scanning process. I fail to see the issue with this specific case. Lots of artists buy stuff and irreversibly modify it. Are we going to be angry now at people who glue their puzzles or use parts of books for scrapbooking? If these were unique works there would be an issue, but I don't think that truly unique pieces would be in their target group, as the destructive scanning is all about cost cutting and unique works cost a lot of money that they wouldn't just destroy.
The fact that they use it for model training and later sell access to that model's work is the shady part that has a severe whiff of plagiarism to it.
Paper is a natural resource, and this literally just wasted a fuck ton. There are non-destructive scanning methods.
They could have just bought the ebooks…
Nope. Ebooks are a license, so the First Sale Doctrine does not apply. Buying ebooks is nearly useless, legally.
I would hazard a guess that the eBook did not exist for the physical books they bought. Still, that doesn't excuse their actions, nor the bigger issues with training LLMs
I think it’s a waste tbh. Like it’s one of those capitalist things of “well its not profitable to sell so lets destroy them”, when anything made for the good of the people would’ve seen a massive opportunity to distribute books to people for free!
Copyright law doesn't allow them to sell the books. It's almost certainly a violation to scan books for their content and then sell them.
Copyright law also doesn’t allow them to download the entirety of a piracy database of books. But here we are, they clearly don’t care about copyright law.
They didn't care at first. The only reason they began destructively scanning books is because they started to care about copyright law: