Why Anthropic destroyed millions of books to train its artificial intelligence

Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot Claude, utilized a process involving the physical destruction of millions of books to facilitate the training of its artificial intelligence models. Newly unsealed court documents indicate that the company acquired large quantities of books, which were then processed in a United States warehouse where hydraulic machinery removed the spines to allow for high-speed industrial scanning of the pages.

This method was employed to convert physical literary content into digital data for AI ingestion. The revelation highlights the intensive physical infrastructure and logistical operations required to source large-scale datasets for the development of modern generative AI technologies.