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Unredacted files reveal Anthropic’s ‘secret plan’ to ‘destructively scan all the books in the world'
(www.thebookseller.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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It's not secret, it was their defence when they got sued for copyright infringement. Instead of download all the books from Anna's archive like meta, they buy a copy, cut the binding, scan it, then destroy it. "We bought a copy for personal use then use the content for profit, it's not piracy"
That is an accurate view of how the court cases have ruled.
Downloading books without paying is illegal copyright infringement.
Using the data from the books to train an AI model is 'sufficiently transformative' and so falls under fair use exemptions for copyright protections.
Yet most AI models can recite entire Harry Potter books if prompted the right way, so that’s all bullshit.
You may not have photographic memory, but dozens of flesh and blood humans do. Are they "illegal" to exist? They can read a book then recite it back to you.
Those are human beings not machines. You are comparing a flesh and blood person to a suped up autocorrect program that is fed data and regurgites it back.
Can't believe I have to point this out to you but machines are not human beings
Point is: some humans can do this without a machine. If a human is assisted by a machine to do something that other humans can do but they cannot - that is illegal?
Believe it or not, but if you wrote down the melody for Bohemia rhapsody (from memory or not) and then sold it, you could be fined for copyright infringement. You can memorise it, you can even cover it, but you can't just sell it. That part still applies to humans. It's the redistribution of that information that's important.