Barbarian Herodotus@BBHerodotus
After seeing a post on it yesterday, I’ve looked more deeply into Anthropic’s purchasing and destruction of millions of used books.
They spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring and destroying books to train their AI model, Claude.
They knew, from the beginning that it would be unpopular. They knew what they were doing, was wrong.
An internal memo from 2024 stated:
“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”
“We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
Why used books?
Companies like Anthropic and Meta found it impractical to gain permission from authors and publishers to use their work.
So instead, they stole their work to train their product through mass purchases of used books and through pirating them from the internet.
The authors of these works, didn’t receive a dime for their efforts. These companies stole the hard won literary talent of others to train machines to replace the victims of their theft.
Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann personally downloaded countless books for this purpose from LibGen, a book pirating website.
When a new book piracy website debuted in 2022, Mann sent an email sharing the link with his employees stating: “just in time!!!”
Meta employees were wary about the piracy of books, with one engineer writing, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”
Anthropic purchased millions of books, in batches of tens of thousands from Better World Books and U.K.-based World of Books.
They then used a “hydraulic powered cutting machine” to slice off the spines of these books before scanning them. Finally, the remains of these books were picked up for recycling.
Feel free to use AI, it’s a free country.
But remember that, if you use Claude, that Anthropic has committed a great wrong, and they knew that they were doing it from the beginning.
Below is an image, from a court case, of a warehouse full of used books, that instead of being held and read by you and your children, have been destroyed forever.
AI is inevitable, but spend your money on the companies who do good, and do not knowingly commit evils.
May the most moral company win.
