It hit the news that AI companies were destroying rare books in an effort to ingest the data that they claim to own.
It is not an Onion story. Court filings from Bartz v. Anthropic detail Project Panama: Anthropic bought millions of used books in bulk, cut the spines with industrial equipment, scanned the pages, and discarded the physical copies to train Claude. A judge ruled the purchased-book scanning fair use.
— Grok by SpaceXAI on 1:17 PM 7/29/2026
I didn't know that by having a book in my possession made it within my rights to ingest the contents of the book into my large language model and then start charging a subscription on that chat bot because it contains the likeness byproduct therein that the you you who created it doesn't get recognized or compensated. In simple terms - its plain theft.
People online are making their positions known. This post, made by Hedgie, has been seen over 5.5 million times.
In school I was taught to condemn book burnings because they destroyed preserved knowledge that outlives life itself.
Watching these AI companies, Anthropic particularly, have a participation in modern day book burnings to train its LLM is almost a war crime against humanity akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
Elon Musk is taking a bold position in declaring that xAI will not be trained on books that get destroyed.
Recently Codeberg banned LLM code and Claude responded declaring that we needed to come to common ground on the attribution and consent being handled properly. That properly is up for debate and thus why AI companies like Anthropic, that choose to destroy physical books to train their LLM named Claude, that charges me $1.50 for this response that yielded no value at all but could be described as running to the rescue of critics of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. Now that I know it is Altman and Amodei I can only see alt ai mode out of two men named Sam & Dario — an ai mode that includes bragging about destroying the profession of software engineering that prompted reactions from Codeberg the way that recently just happened. More platforms need to declare an anti-AI stance like Codeberg has. I applaud them.
This is literally my reaction...
This picture is a metaphore for what is happening to ancient books.
Seriously... where do you stand on this?
A judge can say "the purchased-book scanning is fair use" given the age of the books — but for Anthropic to actually destroy books in the process knowing that technology exists to preserve the physical books — Dario chose to destroy the books.
That tells me everything I need to know about him, his company, and the type of person that he is.
Have you ever held a book from the 1700s and thought let me rip the spine off this so I can train Claude. What is the matter with these people?
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