🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books!

- scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals.
- A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous.
- Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text.
- A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. - Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

It now markets itself as the responsible lab.