The email De Vries received never mentioned artificial intelligence or explained what the books would be used for., but it surfaced as AI companies increasingly look beyond the open internet for high-quality written material to train large language models. Last summer, public attention to AI companies’ use of books intensified when court records revealed Anthropic had purchased millions of physical books, removed their bindings, scanned them and discarded the originals to build a searchable digital library used to train its AI models in what internal documents called “Project Panama,” according to The Washington Post . The process, known as “destructive scanning,” involves cutting the spine from a book so its pages can be fed through high-speed scanners before the remaining physical copy is discarded. The case later settled after a federal judge ruled that using legally purchased books to train AI models constituted fair use under copyright law. Separate claims involving Anthropic’s downloading of books from the LibGen and PiLiMi online libraries were resolved through the settlement. Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phishing-3000-book-copies-scan-destroy/ submitted by /u/fortune
Originally posted by u/fortune on r/ArtificialInteligence