Anthropic Reportedly Sliced Spines and Destroyed Millions of Physical Books for AI Training
2C_ornot2C · x · 2026-07-30
According to reports like 404 Media, Anthropic spent tens of millions buying physical books, sliced the spines off with hydraulic cutters, high-speed scanned them, and sent the originals to recycling.
The goal was to ensure the knowledge existed only inside their models. A federal judge previously ruled the practice as "fair use" because destroying the original means only one copy exists at a time. This has sparked intense ethical debates regarding the preservation of rare books and AI training data copyright.
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