Anthropic Bought Millions of Books, Scanned Them, Then Destroyed Them

In one line: Anthropic reportedly purchased millions of physical books, cut and scanned them for AI training text, then discarded the originals.

Key points

• Anthropic is reported to have bought used books in bulk, sliced off their bindings, and digitally scanned the pages to build training text.
• The scanned paper originals were reportedly discarded rather than reused.
• The practice surfaced through copyright litigation, raising the question of how physically digitizing lawfully acquired books differs from unauthorized web scraping.

Why it matters

The provenance and legality of AI training data is among the industry's biggest risks. A "buy-then-scan" approach may carry a stronger legal defense than unauthorized crawling, but destroying the books themselves raises its own copyright and resource concerns — and could shape how labs source training data going forward.

Read more

• Why Anthropic Bought and Destroyed Millions of Books to Train AI — parametric-architecture.com