Anthropic burned the books?!

Homepage > News > Editorial > Anthropic burned the books?! The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of CoinGeek. Proving what’s actually real The cost of losing the chain of proof Digital access comes with a catch Can blockchain preserve the truth? Anthropic bought millions of used print books, stripped the bindings, cut the pages loose, scanned them into training data, and threw the paper away. That comes straight from the court record. In Bartz v. Anthropic, an order filed June 23, 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled that digitizing books the company had lawfully purchased was fair use. His summary is the coldest sentence I have read in a court order in years: “The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other.” People say “knowledge is power” flippantly, like a poster in a guidance counselor’s office next to “Hang in There” with the kitten trying to navigate a tightrope. Classically, knowledge was the literal operating system of power. Kings and religious orders ruled almost monolithically because they controlled the flow of information. Artificial intelligence (AI) is now democratizing knowledge harder a...