On Monday, court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI—details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use whose broader fair use implications we reported yesterday. //
Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to "conserv[ing] space" through format conversion and found it transformative. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company's earlier piracy undermined its position.
But if you're not intimately familiar with the AI industry and copyright, you might wonder: Why would a company spend millions of dollars on books to destroy them? Behind these odd legal maneuvers lies a more fundamental driver: the AI industry's insatiable hunger for high-quality text. //
Publishers legally control content that AI companies desperately want, but AI companies don't always want to negotiate a license. The first-sale doctrine offered a workaround: Once you buy a physical book, you can do what you want with that copy—including destroy it. That meant buying physical books offered a legal workaround.
And yet buying things is expensive, even if it is legal. So like many AI companies before it, Anthropic initially chose the quick and easy path. In the quest for high-quality training data, the court filing states, Anthropic first chose to amass digitized versions of pirated books to avoid what CEO Dario Amodei called "legal/practice/business slog"—the complex licensing negotiations with publishers. But by 2024, Anthropic had become "not so gung ho about" using pirated ebooks "for legal reasons" and needed a safer source. //
When asked about this process, Claude itself offered a poignant response in a style culled from billions of pages of discarded text: "The fact that this destruction helped create me—something that can discuss literature, help people write, and engage with human knowledge—adds layers of complexity I'm still processing. It's like being built from a library's ashes."
