Taylor Lorenz’s Power User
Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

Is AI Burning The Library Of Alexandria?

August 5, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Truth Behind Anthropic's Book-Scanning Controversy

Viral videos have been circulating online showing massive warehouses filled with books, with what looks like a guillotine slicing off spines before pages are fed into scanners. The footage has sparked outrage, with claims that AI companies are "buying rare books, training on them, then destroying the originals forever." One popular post declared this was "straight out of 1984." But as Taylor Lorenz and copyright lawyer Derek Slater explain, the reality is far more nuanced—and the real culprit may be copyright law itself.

What Anthropic Is Actually Doing

Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, has been acquiring books by the pallet to scan and use as training data for their models. These are not rare, valuable first editions. As Slater notes, "genuinely rare books are not sold by the pallet." The books Anthropic is buying are typically destined for the junk yard—discarded by libraries, bookstores, and other institutions that have run out of archival space. In Hollywood, similar bulk book purchases are common for movie set decoration.

Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.

Read Full Summary →

Free • No credit card required

Listen to Audio Summary Open in App

What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:31) **Episode Introduction: The "Book Guillotine" Goes Viral** - Taylor sets up the controversy: videos of warehouses full of books being spine-sliced and scanned for AI training data, sparking accusations of destroying human knowledge.
  • 2 (03:43) **What Anthropic Is Actually Doing** - Derek confirms Anthropic is acquiring books in bulk to scan text for AI training, but these are discard-pile books destined for the junkyard, not rare collectibles.
  • 3 (08:10) **The Google Books Precedent (and Why It Matters)** - Derek explains the Google Books project from 20 years ago, which digitized over 40 million books without destroying them, and how that legacy shapes today's AI competition.
  • 4 (11:21) **Why Anthropic Can't Just Do What Google Did** - Two reasons: efficiency/cost and, crucially, legal liability. The "destructive scanning" method is cheaper, but the real driver is copyright law.
  • 5 (13:36) **The Legal Bind: $150,000 Per Work** - Taylor and Derek discuss how copyright law's insane potential damages (up to $150,000 per work) force Anthropic to destroy books to avoid bankruptcy-level liability.
  • 6 (15:11) **The Real Villain: The Copyright System** - The conversation pivots to the structural problem: copyright law locks up the vast majority of 20th-century books, which are out of print and impossible to license.
  • 7 (17:20) **Could Anthropic Do Anything Differently?** - Derek explains why there's no easy legal fix, but points to the Google Books case as a possible model if security controls are tight.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Guests on this episode

Taylor Lorenz

Show Notes

Is AI destroying human literature? 

SUPPORT MY WORK: 

Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at https://www.usermag.co      

Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz         

You might have seen the viral videos of a "book guillotine" slicing the spines off thousands of books in a massive warehouse. Last week, the internet exploded after videos surfaced showing Anthropic cutting the spines off thousands of books to train AI models. Social media quickly filled with claims that AI companies were destroying rare books, erasing human knowledge, and building a future where artificial intelligence replaces libraries.

 

But is that actually what happened?

In this episode of Power User, I sit down with copyright attorney Derek Slater, who worked on the original Google Books project, to explain why Anthropic is actually scanning books and destroying physical copies afterward, how decades of copyright law (not just AI) created this bizarre situation, and how we can actually save the books!!

 

We discuss:

  • Why Anthropic buys books by the pallet

  • Whether rare books are actually being destroyed

  • How Google Books handled digitization

  • Why copyright law incentivizes destroying books

  • The Internet Archive lawsuits

  • Fair use and AI training

  • The future of libraries in the AI era

  • Why the viral outrage missed the bigger story


Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

More from this podcast

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User →