Anthropic's book-scanning project decried as 'largest loss of knowledge since the dark ages'
StewartalsopIII · x · 2026-09-14
Investor Stewart Alsop III doubles down on criticizing Anthropic's book acquisition for Project Panama, citing three points: Anthropic bought millions of used books; trained its LLM not to reproduce direct quotes for copyright reasons; and without quotes, LLMs 'garble' the original authors' words—so the books are 'truly lost to civilization,' which he calls the largest loss of knowledge since the dark ages. Grok's fact-check notes no percentages exist in court docs; Anthropic says it bought commonly circulating titles, not rare books, with any scarcity an unquantified side effect. Alsop concedes his conclusions may be off but still calls it a travesty.
Related event: Investor claims Anthropic destroyed millions of books to train LLMs(3 posts)→
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