The scale is completely different. It is like comparing a tiny ant to a Star Devouring Shoggoth. Anthropic destroyed millions of books in hardly any time. They are destroying the foundations of civilization
> They are destroying the foundations of civilization
No, they are not. For all the hype around that 404 media article, no one came forward with titles or authors. Turns out the booksellers that sold them those books said they were "dead inventory".
If you're going to assert that companies are destroying the foundations of civilization, you're going to have to produce quite a bit more evidence than the (poorly cited) 404 Media article.
Evidence ? Good lord, how about the US district court of justice ? Anthropic physically destroyed millions of books after scanning them - are you really, truly questioning that ?
> Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase MILLIONS of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals.
Dismissing the above as "dead inventory" is atrocious reasoning. The more obscure/low-circulation books are arguably MORE valuable as training material because they contain information that is less likely to be duplicated across the ordinary web.
And 404 Media's reporting wasn't merely based on a bookseller's terminology of your "dead inventory". There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"
They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.
But nothing you're citing adds up to "destroying the foundations of civilization". What we have instead is companies that are now paying to get copies of creative works (isn't this what everyone is complaining about with all the "theft" rhetoric?) so they can use them for training.
When they discuss scanning all the books in the world, they are not talking about every copy, since that makes no sense. They want one of each.
So, in the end, this all sounds like some breathless emotional take because large companies are buying copies of books and using them to train AI and throwing them away. They are probably destroying fewer books than the publishing houses do over the same time period.
This is like the water discussion: people with no understanding of agriculture (or publishing) hear a sound-bite about what AI is doing, and, with little-to-no context, devolve into a panic about it.
Again: cite real harm. What books aren't available? What knowledge was destroyed? There are real concerns about AI, but this whole discussion is a distraction.
Many were out of print or were used copies, so they weren't books you could simply order new from a publisher. They are out of print. Anthropic deliberately sourced large quantities through used-book sellers such as Better World Books and World of Books and destroyed the physical copies after scanning them.
If you find this a "breathless emotional take", then I don't even know what to say. Nothing will meet your "evidence" criteria to dislodge your fervent fawning and support for destruction carried out by AI corporations.
> They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.
By your reasoning, if I could afford to buy every surviving painting by Van Gogh and Rembrandt and I burned them in a bon fire I wouldn't be taking anything from human culture and nobody should care at all about what I do with my belongings.
Destroying something that is rare or one of a kind and valuable does matter. Doing it so that you can exclusively profit off of charging people for software that regurgitates lossy and error filled versions of what was lost makes it even worse.
In your scenario, the bug is letting someone control all of that in a private collection. But that scenario is completely divorced from what is actually happening, so I don't think it's worth discussing too deeply here.
If you actually object to the concept that people that own a physical object get to decide how to dispose of it, that would be an interesting discussion to have because it would fly in the face of property ownership rights.
Why such a blinkered argument, I own the soda can I just drank but it is still, arguably, wrong of me to chuck it in the trash instead of the recycle bin. Yes, you have the "right" to dispose of things you own but there's more to what's right than that. There's human decency, consideration, awareness of the environment, the spirit of the laws, cases the laws were not designed for in mind etc.
Like, tell your mother or HS teacher you decided not to recycle because you own your trash. See how well that clever argument goes.
you should indeed be able to, but maybe buying art shouldn't be allowed at all, with people only being allowed digital recreations.
why do you need more than a picture of the rembrandt? there's so much good artwork easily available that the rembrandt is only worth money because hoity toity people want to store their money in it and in the future sell it again
> There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"
If I do something destructive to my copy of Accelerate -- feed it through a scanner, leave it where the munchkin can reach, whatever -- that does nothing to deprive you of your copy. Books are funny like that; there tend to be lots of identical ones.
Russia also criticized the ethnic cleansing of Donbass via artillery strikes on civilian areas - casualties and deaths reported daily in the LPR and DPR media, but never made a single peep in the Western news.
I meant the strikes while the Minsk ceasefire was in effect - one that was admitted to by Merkel to merely buy time for Ukraine's arms build-up into the 3rd largest European military. And then used effectively to shell and kill Russian civilians including children. Not a SINGLE word in the Western media. There dozens of such daily reports in 2021 marking deaths and casualties as very banal. Never made a peep in the Western news.
God, this was so complicated to understand just to get an icon aligned properly with multi-line text. Someone needs to re-design CSS from scratch for average human brains. Its has become a rube goldberg machine of complexity.
The dollar is most certainly backed by military of the Corporate States. This is eminently observable to the rest of the world, who tend to get "regime changed" when the talk comes about not using the USD.
The leaked, then, declassified emails about Gaddafi and how his "Gold Dinar" was considered a threat really opens your eyes on why the Corporate States maintains a very big stick to hit anyone they don't like in the world and most especially nations who were foolish enough to disarm, stupidly trusting the Corporate States.
Low earth orbit isn't that much space though right ? It is effectively a stack of practical orbital shells. A rogue nation state can make satellite launches financially unfeasible.
Feels like the AI Lords will fully own the knowledge space in the future. They will be the ones to pay gigs to get people to code or write for them for pennies. And anything you produce will be owned by them fully of-course.
> But we can easily affort 500+ million per day for faraway foreign wars! That, no problem.
That's because War is a wealth transfer program to the billionaire class. Look at the stock prices of the Big-5 War Companies of the Corporate States of America. Look at the wealth of their executive boards and CEO compensation - which has increased even more in 2026.
Europe is already in a warm-war with Russia. EU has sent hundreds of thousands of drones used to attack Russia - along with training, intelligence and target guidance. EU airspace is used openly by Ukraine to attack Russia. IMHO, war should be openly declared with clear objectives. That way the Russian €200 billion can be openly seized without all the whining.
This puzzles me. If Ukrainian drones have free reign of EU airspace to carry out attacks on Russia, then why can't Russian drones cross EU airspace ? Isn't that just symmetric ? Have any Russian drones caused EU casualties ?
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
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