
Anthropics „geheimer Plan“, „alle Bücher der Welt zerstörerisch zu scannen“, wurde durch nicht redigierte Dateien enthüllt
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/unredacted-files-reveal-anthropics-secret-plan-to-destructively-scan-all-the-books-in-the-world
30 Kommentare
Secret? Everything they steal and take from the internet without warning and without regard for the law is not a secret; Big Tech doesn’t respect the law.
Why would they scan a book more than once?
‚Buttle or Tuttle‘ ?
„Destructively“? Are they burning the books after scanning them?
Lol this feels like OpenAI trying to discredit their competition. They’re all doing this, why are we only focusing on Anthropic?
They paid for the books. What exactly is the issue here?
They buy wholesale used books and it’s easier to scan them by cutting the binding. It’s not like trying to burn books for censorship like Nazis or something.
First they get sued for $3 billion for environmentally friendly downloading books, now people are mad that they actually plan to buy the books?
Google did it first (not sure about the destructive part)
Do they have so much material that not destroying the bindings saves them that much time? You can do really fast scanning with pro level scanners, I thought the amount of material actually available is the biggest constraint
Farenheit 451
Didn’t Google do this years ago? I think the original idea was to make the world’s books available to everybody but ran into legal problems with licensing and how to compensate authors for works they can’t properly credit
I’m sure they bought each one of those books too….
„you will own nothing and like it“
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge written in 2006 is about this very dystopian idea: destroy physical books once they are digitally copied.
Marc Andreessen is possibly more evil than Peter Theil
Destructively?
Can i do the same though?
Relevant article from last year: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/
>Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to “conserv[ing] space” through format conversion and found it transformative. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company’s earlier piracy undermined its position.
Isn’t this the plot of the cartoon villains from Yooka-Laylee?
Google and Amazon did this long before Anthropic. Google even has specialized equipment for it.
I used to do document scanning for a living. This was over 20 years ago when the technology was still kind of crude.
But in order to scan an actual book, we had to use a big slicer and cut the book off of the spine, then run the pages through a scanner. This was „destructive“ scanning because the book is destroyed in the process. The pages are intact, but the customer never wanted them back, that’s the whole reason they wanted their books scanned – to save space.
So I hope that’s what they’re talking about, the simple fact that it’s hard to scan a bound book without destroying it. Not a sinister plan to seek out and destroy all printed books.
So the largest piracy campaign in history?
Stop whitewashing this shit. Call a spade a spade.
Remember when Google tried to scan all books in existence? Good times.
I know a sensationalist headline when I see one. Not even going to click the link.
I mean, you would be incompetent if that were not the plan.
What does „destructively scan“ mean in this context? If they mean „scan“, then I’m all for that. I’m anti copyright and believe all data, music, books, etc should be freely available for all.
Comment section is a mess. Here’s what’s actually happening:
– Anthropic is purchasing a single copy of a book and scanning it into their model (this is legal according to the resolution of a lawsuit)
– They destroy the purchased books by cutting the binding to make them easier to scan
– They are not destroying other copies of the book
You don’t have to like what they are doing but it’s not what they are being accused of in the comments.
At least they are buying the books.
This is clickbait BS.
There are literal businesses setup that only do this to sell your information and were around before ai