News Summary

Anthropic, an AI company, has come under scrutiny for its practice of destroying millions of print books to train its AI models. The company hired Tom Turvey, formerly of Google’s book-scanning project, to lead the initiative, which involved cutting books from their bindings, scanning them, and discarding the originals. This method was chosen for its speed and cost-effectiveness. Despite the controversy, a court ruled that the process was fair use, as Anthropic had legally purchased the books and retained the digital files internally. This ruling highlights ongoing debates about the ethical and legal aspects of AI training practices.