Anthropic’s secret plan to ‘destructively scan every book in the world’(washingtonpost.com)
washingtonpost.com
Anthropic’s secret plan to ‘destructively scan every book in the world’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/
5 comments
Alexandria all over again.
Is there any (major) AI-company that is not a total douchebag? The greed on display combined with a total absence of any kind of moral compass is sickening.
The conception that books are precious is an artifact of history.
Of course rare historical volumes are precious, but stuff you can buy new right now or that exists in the tens of thousands of copies? No.
Of course rare historical volumes are precious, but stuff you can buy new right now or that exists in the tens of thousands of copies? No.
Second, destructive scanning is a cool and useful service. I've used it myself to turn old books into PDFs. And this isn't Alexandria; these are all books for which many copies exist.