Digital WorldGlobal issues
Why is Anthropic destroying millions of books?

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Yannick Beierlein | Ha Thanh Le Nguyen
August 6, 2026Advertisement
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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