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New: Unsealed court docs detail Big Tech’s yearslong, secret race to ingest the collective works of humanity, including Anthropic’s project to “destructively scan all the books in the world.” Gift link: wapo.st/4rjXAMQ

Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books to oversee its secret "Project Panama," new court docs show — quietly buying millions of used books in bulk, breaking their spines and scanning them to feed into its Claude chatbot. wapo.st/4rjXAMQ

Anthropic's project to "destructively scan all the books in the world" was actually viewed as the *more* ethical and legally sound approach to training its AI. Previously the industry standard had been simply to pirate vast "shadow libraries" of digitized books for free online. wapo.st/4rjXAMQ

Yep. The world just has more books than it can use. Once I learned that libraries regularly burned books just for inventory reasons, I stopped caring about anyone else burning them for non-ideological reasons.

No actually I get it every time someone creases the spine on a book I feel an overwhelming desire to hit them over the head with it because it's NOT EVEN HARD TO NOT DO THAT *UGH.*

for sure, I mean, that's an aesthetic preference and everyone will have opinions and tastes for the things we personally own I think that's different than all these comments that are talking about it as if it's some sort of moral imperative or something