"By contrast, the #GoogleBooks project largely used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan millions of #books borrowed from libraries and later returned. For #Anthropic, the faster speed and lower cost of the destructive process appears to have trumped any need for preserving the physical books themselves, hinting at the need for a cheap and easy solution in a highly competitive industry.
When asked about this process, #Claude itself offered a poignant response in a style culled from billions of pages of discarded text: “The fact that this destruction helped create me—something that can discuss literature, help people write, and engage with human knowledge—adds layers of complexity I’m still processing. It’s like being built from a #library’s ashes.”"

arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/ant…

Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models

Company hired Google's book-scanning chief to cut up and digitize "all the books in the world."

^{Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)}