Laban Johnson

THIS IS F*CKING DISTURBING!!!🤯 A leaked Anthropic document just came out in court. Their own words: "Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world." Next line: "We don't want it to be known that we are working on this." They planned to shred every book on the planet, in secret. And they almost got away with it. It starts with theft. Anthropic stole 7 MILLION books from pirate sites to train Claude, because their CEO said paying authors was too much of a "slog." Then the lawsuits hit and they needed a legal way to keep going. So they hired the ex-head of Google Books and sent him to publishers to ask for permission. Publishers said no. That's when they found the loophole. Buy millions of real, physical books. Cut the spines off with a hydraulic blade, scan the loose pages, and throw what's left in recycling. One vendor offered to destroy 2 MILLION books in 6 months. That's 11,000 books a day. Now the insane part.. destroying the books is what made it legal. If you scan a book and keep it, that's a crime. If you scan it and shred it, that's fair use. A judge actually approved this, which means the shredder WAS the legal strategy. They still paid $1.5 billion for the stolen books, the biggest copyright settlement in history. Works out to $3,000 per book. And the scans are locked in Anthropic's private library forever. Nobody outside the company will ever see them. The authors got a shredded book and nothing else. The part I can't stop thinking about is that a book on a shelf lasts 500 years without power, wifi, or a subscription, and the AI it was destroyed for gets thrown away in 18 months. They killed something permanent to feed something disposable.

@julianbulian long live @labanjohnson king of the golden twitter rule