AI companies buying tons of old AI-free books to copy & industrially destroy them

AI companies like Anthropic are buying tons of old printed books, which they can purchase en masse at low prices, to train AI models, 404 Media reported. Anthropic used a machine to neatly remove pages and scan them with industrial-grade imaging machines, as pre-2022 books are free of AI slop. The companies may be destroying even rare and out-of-print books.