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Why is Anthropic destroying millions of books?

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Yannick Beierlein | Ha Thanh Le Nguyen
August 6, 2026

Anthropic, the company behind the AI platform Claude, has been training its models on old books, destroying the physical copies in the process. Does that mean their contents are lost forever?

AI companies are running out of high-quality training data. So they're buying up thousands of books, cutting them apart, scanning every page, and throwing the originals away. But are they destroying cultural treasures, or simply digitizing forgotten knowledge? Here's what's really happening.

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