Late last month, Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the chatbot Claude, agreed to a whopping $1.5 billion settlement resolving copyright claims over its acquisition and use of millions of pirated books to develop its AI models, making it the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history.
According to court documents, Anthropic’s Project Panama involved the purchasing of millions of physical books in bulk, which hydraulic cutting machines then sliced the spines off of so that the pages could be fed into high-speed scanners to train Claude.
The remnants of the books were then shredded — and that’s the part that disturbs Glenn Beck the most.
“The book is not discarded; it’s shredded. … It’s destroyed on purpose because now the digital copy is now considered enough,” he warns.
On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn imagines a future where physical books are a thing of the past and the terrifying implications of such a dystopia.
Digitally preserving all books is a “fine goal” as long as it doesn’t involve the destruction of physical books, says Glenn.
But Project Panama did not appear to share that restraint. Not only did internal Anthropic planning documents that surfaced in court filings describe the operation as an “effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” but employees were also explicitly told: “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
And the books they went after weren’t just any titles sitting on a Barnes & Noble shelf. Reporting shows Anthropic heavily pursued older, used, and out-of-print volumes, including obscure and hard-to-find titles.
“These rare, rare bookstores started getting phone calls [asking] … ‘Do you have these titles? … We’ll buy all of them,” Glenn summarizes.
A judge later ruled that Anthropic’s destructive scanning of lawfully purchased books qualified as fair use under copyright law. The court reasoned that converting legally acquired print books into digital copies for internal use was transformative, with the destruction of the original books supporting that conclusion because Anthropic was not retaining both physical and digital libraries.
While destroying books may be legal, it’s certainly infuriating to a great many bibliophiles and history buffs.
“Men and women who have dedicated their lives to protecting books, to protecting history, these rare books — they were obviously outraged. When I read the story, I was outraged,” says Glenn, noting that some of the titles Anthropic destroyed “were the single remaining [copies] left … in the world.”
While Glenn wants American AI companies to build “the smartest systems on Earth” using books, he doesn’t want tangible copies destroyed, especially when those copies are rare or out-of-print titles.
“Books are civilization’s memories. Scan them, learn from them, preserve them — but never confuse scanning with shredding,” he pleads.
The destruction of physical books is something Glenn has warned about for years, which is why he always urges his audience to “buy paper copies.”
“A book is a witness,” he says. “Once it’s printed, it can’t quietly change overnight. Nobody can sneak into your library at night and rewrite page 247; nobody can update chapter 5 while you’re asleep.”
Not so with digital files.
“I’m not claiming Anthropic is secretly changing books. I’m saying something more simple and much more dangerous: Without the original, there is nothing left to check against the file,” says Glenn. “The original is the referee. You destroy the referee and eventually somebody else decides what the score was.”
“That’s not paranoia. This is history. You cannot destroy the original because any digital copy can be changed, and you have nothing to check it against.”
To hear more, watch the video above.
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Glenn beck, Artificial intelligence, Anthropic, Claude, Book burning, Blazetv show
