‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.’ It would appear that the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has taken Francis Bacon’s advice rather too literally.
Anthropic has drawn criticism following revelations it has been cannibalising millions of print books to feed its ravenous learning systems. In the scanning process it has destroyed these items, including texts of considerable rarity.
Hydraulic powered cutting machines are used to slice off the spines and covers – the footage is enough to give any bookworm nightmares. After the carnage, a recycling company comes in and clears everything up. Talk about getting rid of the paper trail.
WTF AI companies are purchasing large quantities of used and rare books. Scanning their contents to train models. Then turning the originals to pulp.The sum of human thought, digitized and shredded.Every book that gets scanned disappears from the physical world permanently.… pic.twitter.com/zCDV0tFaci— Shruti (@heyshrutimishra) July 29, 2026
This follows a $1.5 billion copyright infringement lawsuit last year, in which Anthropic was found to have pirated digitised books to train its AI assistant, Claude. The court ruled that while using text to train AI models constituted fair use, the company had acquired the titles without the consent of authors. So now Anthropic has progressed from straightforward online piracy to the perfectly legal but wanton destruction of physical books.
