The Damage Report
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Anthopic Company Hit With MASSIVE Legal Blow As Disastrous Book Destruction Uncovered
Posted
August 3, 2026
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6:23Now PlayingAI companies, such as Anthropic, gets busted in massive lawsuit as shocking mass book destruction, including of rare books, sparks massive backlash. John Iadarola and Sharon Reed break it down on The Damage Report. Leave a comment with your thoughts below!
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AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale
"Traditionally, books have been good for two things: reading, and looking nice on a shelf.
But AI companies are interested in neither.
To those building large language models, books are nothing more than fodder to be devoured en masse before being spit out like fishbone. Often, they’re happy to use digital books — or even better, pirated digital books, as Meta has been accused of doing, and as Anthropic was forced to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to authors for also doing.
But many companies, including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical books instead, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap. According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to train its AI.
This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so. And since Anthropic was turning the original physical texts into digital ones — rather than redistributing them as new copies — a judge found this to be “transformative,” and therefore protected by fair use."
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