WHY ? Anthropic eventually bought millions of books, often in batches of tens of thousands, according to the filings. It relied on booksellers including used book retailers Better World Books and U.K.-based World of Books. The ultimate number of books scanned and their cost are redacted in the documents, but a project proposal by a vendor that ultimately worked with Anthropic noted that the AI company was “seeking an experienced document scanning services vendor to convert from 500,000 to two million books over a six-month period.”; Better World Books and World of Books did not respond to requests for comment on Monday. The document describes how the scanning company’s “hydraulic powered cutting machine” would “neatly cut” books, whose pages would later be “scanned on high speed, high quality, production level scanners.” Finally, it notes, the scanning company will “schedule with the recycling company to pick up the completed books.”; In their lawsuit, the authors alleged that Meta higher-ups considered paying for books to train their AI models but opted to instead download millions of books free from “torrent” platforms that facilitate online piracy. The way platforms are designed often rewards users who upload material with faster downloads of large collections of files. Internal documents, some of which have been previously reported, showed Meta employees expressing concern that what they were doing was risky or wrong — and discussing how to cover their tracks. “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right,” one engineer wrote in 2023, according to the documents. The same employee later shared a concern with the company’s legal team that using torrent sites could entail sharing pirated works with others, which “could be legally not OK.”; CONTROL; MAYBE REVISE to fit their agenda ? Think Wikepedia