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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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Yeah that's exactly it. James Patterson, for example, has written dozens of books, and there are billions of his books alone. They're taking one of each, cutting off the binding, and scanning the pages. This is standard procedure for common books.
So why don't they want people knowing about it? Because a lot of people are anti-AI and will run misleading stories like this.
I'm as anti-AI as the next guy, but unlike other companies scraping all of reddit and stealing art off the Internet, these guys are doing it mostly properly by paying for the books. They still don't have a license to use the material in this manner, though.
They don't need a license to use material in this way under extant US law. Copyright is overwhelmingly about reproduction rather than consumption.
They also initially took content from libgen, which is a fair bit less legal. Personally, I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, I don't like some shitty for-profit AI company making money from the collective works of civilisation. On the other hand, I think copyright protects works for far too long anyway and most should be in the commons already. Mind you, I would be more sympathetic if Anthropic et al. were doing all this for research purposes instead of capitalism. Maybe that would be a better copyright reform, in that it expires much more quickly than the current laws (say 10 years) but restricts third parties making a profit for a longer period. Likely that would be complex to design and enforce, however.