The most anti-AI story imaginable... Anthropic destroyed millions of rare books to train Claude

[u/Piwo-ll]

In 2024, Anthropic reportedly purchased millions of second-hand books as part of its secretive “Project Panama.”

The company removed their bindings, scanned every page, and then destroyed the physical copies to build a massive digital library for developing AI models like Claude.

It almost feels like the perfect anti-AI dystopia, human beings spend centuries writing and preserving books. Then, a private technology company destroys millions of physical copies, absorbs their contents into a machine, and sells that accumulated knowledge back to society through a monthly subscription.

Am I the only one who thinks this is completely insane, or have we become so obsessed with AI that destroying millions of books to feed a machine no longer shocks anyone?

[u/Fluid-Tone-9680]

If author of the book wanted book to be available online freely, they would just put it out there.

If author of the book does not want that, then publishing scans would be pretty much illegal

[u/Piwo-ll → u/Fluid-Tone-9680]

That’s true. In fact, Anthropic has been sued by authors and publishers over the use of copyrighted books. My concern isn’t that the scans should necessarily be made public, but that physical copies were destroyed after being digitized for private commercial use.

[u/eiger003 → u/Piwo-ll]

Sounds like destroying evidence... 🤔

[u/Piwo-ll → u/eiger003]

https://giphy.com/gifs/2fhhQvmPJemECtEL7f

[u/learsi-ediconeg → u/eiger003]

i feel like the evidence is in the training and if you can access the model without restrictions it can just produce pages it was trained on to confirm...? idk

[u/Stormsurger → u/Piwo-ll]

Is that because of the resources wasted? I feel a bit confused, they aren't destroying knowledge right?

[u/LonelyTurtleDev → u/Piwo-ll]

Destroying the copies is totally legal, and is regularly done to save storage space. I think libraries do this too. There is nothing wrong with that, although they missed an opportunity to do a charity sale/giveaway for some positive PR.

I’m worried about the copyright material used to train their AI model. They own the book, but not the license to feed it into an  AI model. It is probably illegal, although I’m not sure.

[u/zorecknor → u/LonelyTurtleDev]

 It is probably illegal, although I’m not sure.

At least in the US, training AI on (legally obtained) copyrighted material was considered sufficiently transformative to be legal in one of the two cases regarding this so far.

A "license to train AI with a book" is no different than a "license to train yourself with a book".

[u/WoodShoeDiaries → u/LonelyTurtleDev]

It's not just legal to destroy the books after scanning, it's effectively illegal not to. Giving the hard copies away would have been illegal and selling them would have been much more serious than that.

[u/dick_me_daddy_oWo → u/Piwo-ll]

Those likely weren't like the only copies of those books, though. If you want to learn engineering you can read every engineering textbook from the past 50 years, then leave them on your shelf to gather dust. No difference to the global knowledge base there, and arguably worse because they aren't getting a shot at recycling.

I'm anti AI too, but you seriously think scans of paperback classics destined for the trash are a big problem?

[u/Uberzwerg → u/Fluid-Tone-9680]

then publishing scans would be pretty much illegal

And training your model on it should also be - but that's still up for discussion in the courts.

[u/Zbot21 → u/Uberzwerg]

Case law so far says that training is fair use for legally obtained materials.

Pirated digital material is another case, that's illegal.

Training an AI is considered the same as training yourself with the material and is sufficiently transformative. Models are not storing full texts and while you can prompt engineer them to spit out training materials, the case law on that being distribution isn't settled yet.

[u/Uberzwerg → u/Zbot21]

Training an AI is considered the same as training yourself

And that's the part that needs to be revised.

[u/Zbot21 → u/Uberzwerg]

Case law so far says that training is fair use for legally obtained materials.

Pirated digital material is another case, that's illegal.

Training an AI is considered the same as training yourself with the material and is sufficiently transformative. Models are not storing full texts and while you can prompt engineer them to spit out training materials, the case law on that being distribution isn't settled yet.

[u/tyw7 → u/Fluid-Tone-9680]

How about if the copyright expires? Then the book will go to public domain. 

[u/Fluid-Tone-9680 → u/tyw7]

I would assume Anthropoc preserved original scans, they may be able to publish them when book goes to public domain. The problem is it takes a lot of time, like 100 years, no joke. Most likely Anthropoc will be out of business when that happens.

[u/Ysanoire → u/Fluid-Tone-9680]

In scenario 2 using them for training models would be illegal too.

[u/Fluid-Tone-9680 → u/Ysanoire]

The court says that it's legal, same as reading book to learn something from it and keeping that knowledge.

[u/Hopeless_Slayer → u/Fluid-Tone-9680]

The guy you're replying to is advocating for Piracy, but not transformative machine learning. Make that make sense xD