Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models

Anthropic physically destroyed millions of print books by cutting them from their bindings and scanning them to create training data for Claude AI. The company hired Google Books' former partnerships head to lead this massive digitization effort. A federal judge ruled this destructive scanning process constituted fair use because Anthropic legally purchased the books, destroyed each physical copy after scanning, and kept digital files internal rather than distributing them. The ruling establishes important precedent for AI training data acquisition methods.