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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

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.

yeah, it's so funny that 'breaking spines' is specifically intended as some sort of visceral reaction or something it's a book? it's a bunch of paper bound together with glue? they are inherently mass-produced objects? these aren't some rare one-of-a-kind first editions or something, it's fine

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.*