How Silicon Valley built AI: Buying, scanning and discarding millions of books [View all]

[highplainsdem]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot Claude.

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Books were viewed by the companies as a crucial prize, the court records show. In a January 2023 document, one Anthropic co-founder theorized that training AI models on books could teach them “how to write well” instead of mimicking “low quality internet speak.” A 2024 email inside Meta described accessing a digital trove of books as “essential” to being competitive with its AI rivals.

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On several occasions, Meta employees raised concerns in internal messages that downloading a collection of millions of books without permission would violate copyright law. In December 2023, an internal email said the practice had been approved after “escalation to MZ,” an apparent reference to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, according to filings in a copyright lawsuit brought by book authors against the company. Meta declined to comment for this story.

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Much more at the link.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as an ethical, legally trained generative AI model.

No such thing as an ethical genAI company.

No such thing as an ethical genAI tech executive, company owner/investor or staffer, including scientists, who knew of the intellectual property theft and went along with it.

The training of all these AI models involved the greatest theft of intellectual property ever.

If you're aware of that theft, you should NOT be using genAI voluntarily, or promoting its use, including by circulating what's produced by genAI - whethet it's text, images, video or music. Because if you do so, you're giving a thumbs-up to the theft, and to thieves who belong in prison.

I know some people are forced by their schools or jobs to use genAI. They should still point out that it's unethical, just as I hope they would if child labor or slavery was involved.


EDITING to link to two threads about the very appropriate reaction on Bluesky to a teacher's union head having foolishly posted AI slop she thought was "fun" -

American Federation of Teachers president thought AI slop would be "fun" to share on Bluesky. Big mistake.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220895596

If you support unions (DUers should) but still think it's OK to post AI slop, see the hundreds of Bluesky replies
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220895856