James Payne

In early 2026, the owner of an independent bookstore in Brooklyn began receiving order requests that he later described as “brazen and bizarre.” Obscure titles such as “How to Win in Small Claims Court in New York” and “Cultures of Glass Architecture” were suddenly in demand. The orders were coming, ten books at a time, through a website on which they’d typically sold ten titles annually. Other booksellers around the country reported similar happenings online. Anthropic, the A.I. company behind Claude, is trying to acquire as many printed books as possible. In its own legal filings, it wrote about a covert program to “destructively scan all the books in the world.” And “destructively scan” means precisely that. The process involves the use of a hydraulic-powered cutting machine, also known as a “book guillotine.” Such destruction is protected under fair use, as it fundamentally transforms the source text. This—not the destructive scanning itself—may be more worrisome, Francesca Mancino argues. Mancino explores the physical and intellectual destruction occurring in the name of training A.I. models: newyorker.com/culture/the-le…

Anthropic is trying to “destructively scan all the books in the world.” How worried should we be? newyorker.com/culture/the-le…