Posted on 07/30/2026 7:16:31 AM PDT by Red Badger
The ruling does change the fundamental nature of what the books were intended for: they were intended to be read by human beings, not used as training for machines to replace human thought and ingenuity.
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AI companies are buying old books, scanning them, then destroying them. Anthropic has been buying the books to feed the machine with human knowledge and ideas written down before the AI era, so only books with publication dates before 2022 will do. Once they have the books, they rip off the spines, feed them through a scanner, and then on into the gaping maw of the AI LLMs that consume everything, including, eventually, themselves.
The revelations came out in a lawsuit brought by authors who said the destruction violated the Copyright Act. Federal judge for the Northern District of California William Alsup ruled that the bulk buy, scanning, and destruction is fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. As far back as 2024, Anthropic, which has come under fire by the Trump administration over national security concerns, said "We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this." It's not a good look to be destroying books.
The suit reads that authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson were a few of the authors whose books were bought by Anthropic. For use in Claude, Anthropic "assembled these copies into a central library of its own, copied further various sets and subsets of those library copies to include in various 'data mixes,' and used these mixes to train various LLMs. Anthropic kept the library copies in place as a permanent, general-purpose resource even after deciding it would not use certain copies to train LLMs or would never use them again to do so." The authors had not agreed to this and these copies of their books were taken permanently out of circulation, never to be read by human eyes again.
Anthropic is one of these companies that has been buying physical books in bulk to rip apart, scan, then destroy, in service to its AI model Claude. Any books will do, even if that book is the very last copy of that book in the world. Legally, this is allowed under the first-sale doctrine, which permits a book-buyer to do whatever they want with that book object, without a need for the copyright owner's permission. It's an object, like a pair of shoes or a blender.
The ruling reads: "every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company."
In the suit, a judge found that because Anthropic was using the books in a way that fundamentally transformed them into something else, in this case turning them from books into raw data that will have no reference to their original self, and that this constituted fair use. Previous to the bulk buying of books, Anthropic pirated books or bought pirated books. They looked to former head of Google Books' scan project Tom Turvey to come in and get more data to feed the LLM. That data was not just information but also style and tone, proprietary authorial elements.
There's lots of companies that are willing to do the selling. ISBNdb claims to have the "world's largest book database," and says "the world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf." They also promise not to reveal who is doing the bulk buying, knowing that no AI company wants to be the subject of a headline about how they're destroying millions of books at a go.
ISBNdb says that AI training on AI material results in data degradation. "Not all data degradation is intentional," says ISBNdb. "When AI systems train on text that was itself AI-generated, a documented phenomenon called model collapse occurs: subtle linguistic nuances vanish, systematic errors compound, and outputs converge on repetitive patterns. Each generation trained on synthetic data is slightly worse than the last. Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage."
404 Media spoke to a bookseller who said that bulk orders from his store have resulted in the destruction of out-of-print books for which there are only single copies remaining. "I personally have mixed feelings about all of this," said the bookseller. "It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. I’ve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped."
The ruling reads: "This order grants summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use was a fair use. And, it grants that the print-to-digital format change was a fair use for a different reason. But it denies summary judgment for Anthropic that the pirated library copies must be treated as training copies." The ruling does change the fundamental nature, however, of what the books were intended for: they were intended to be read by human beings, not used as training for machines to replace human thought and ingenuity.
As it stands, Anthropic and other AI companies that are developing and furthering their large language models for use both as information and writing tools are permitted to take books out of circulation, feed them to the LLM, and destroy them, without concern for copyright law or, as it turns out, the preservation of the scope and breadth of human history, knowledge, experience, and creativity.
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That is not the worry. The worry is that AI is displacing a lot of human work, so they are finding ways to get people upset about AI.
You never been able to buy one copy of a textbook and photo copy copies for the rest of the class. That’s basically what’s going on here. They’re buying one book, scanning it and reusing the content over and over.
You are assuming it is only one book. It could easily be a book for every data center and more for a book that does not transfer the first time accurately. Or how about a limited print of rare copy? Do you honestly think they are not pumping those into an AI database?
Regardless, the wonton destruction, needlessly, of written literature should never be accepted so casually.
This is wrong.
The books belong in a library or museum.
No one has the right to destroy one human thought, I don’t care how old the books are or how many judges chime in, if we give in to this level of tyranny, we’re done, it’s over the future will steam roller all of us into the ground without a hint of remorse.
exactly
a bunch of nonsense
they only need to scan one copy of a book. And in most cases these are crap books no one wanted to begin with that would of ended up in a landfill.
Bye bye truth. Bye bye history. Rewritten. You will only know what they tell you- first MSM, now this. I LOATHE this world. It’s abhorrent and incompatible with God given normal human life now in so many unbearable ways. Everything EVERY NECESSARY DAILY TASK that requires interaction with world is an assault on your individuality and God given rights
“Maybe we can live without libraries, people like you and me. Maybe. Sure, we’re too old to change the world, but what about that kid, sitting down, opening a book, right now, in a branch at the local library and finding drawings of pee-pees and wee-wees on the Cat in the Hat and the Five Chinese Brothers? Doesn’t HE deserve better? Look. If you think this is about overdue fines and missing books, you’d better think again.”
Let's close these libraries and use the savings to buy votes and expand our power.
LMAO. No it’s not a book for every data center. That’s not how it works and it would cost them a lot more to do that for no gain.
That is merely a self-righteous way to destroy them.
So do people.
Actually you can if the book is no longer under copyright.
BS. Almost nobody would want such a job.
Rush - The Temples Of Syrinx
[Verse 1]
We’ve taken care of everything
The words you read, the songs you sing
The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes
It’s one for all and all for one
We work together, common sons
Never need to wonder how or why
[Chorus]
We are the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx
Our great computers fill the hallowed halls
We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx
All the gifts of life are held within our walls
[Verse 2]
Look around at this world we’ve made
Equality, our stock-in-trade
Come and join the Brotherhood of Man
Oh, what a nice, contented world
Let the banners be unfurled
Hold the Red Star proudly high in hand
[Chorus]
We are the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx
Our great computers fill the hallowed halls
We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx
All the gifts of life are held within our walls
Probably not but you literally have no idea the impact, you are just spewing. I only presented possibilities and a moral reason for why the destruction of written literature should not be a casual thought.
You spew personal opinion and expect others to treat it as informed fact and, on this thread, did it in a captious way.
I have that!..............
There is a difference between doing so with a book that is under copyright and one that isn’t. This article is about preserving the content of books whose copyrights have expired and whose plates are no longer kept by the publisher. The scanned books are destroyed because they have served their purpose and would go right back to be ignored if stored someplace, which would cost money.
Rare books shouldn’t be destroyed.
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