Anthropic's plan to scan and dispose of books(washingtonpost.com)
washingtonpost.com
Anthropic's plan to scan and dispose of books
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books
5 comments
Destructive scanning of books can be perfectly fine. Books are disposable information delivery vehicles. The idea that books are sacred objects is a fossil of an age long ended.
Feeding scanned books into AI models is not preservation. The information is not intact. It becomes alloyed with other information. So then the only record is the scan. Who holds owns that? Who stores it? Will it be stored even when it is no longer profitable to do so?
I didn't say it was preservation. It doesn't have to be preservation to be acceptable. Books are destroyed by the millions all the time. Publishers pulp vast quantities of surplus books for tax reasons. Paperbacks that don't sell aren't shipped back; they're stripped of their covers and discarded.
The only thing to regret when most books are destroyed is that the resources that went into creating them were lost, and that's a minor regret.
The only thing to regret when most books are destroyed is that the resources that went into creating them were lost, and that's a minor regret.
I have visions of the book scanner in Vernor Vinge's SF novel "Rainbows End" (a book I love). A machine rips the books up into small pieces, photographs are taken and "AI" software then reads and assembles the pictures to digital files. Vinge didn't write an instruction manual for this process.