Destroying Books to Build a Mind | The New Yorker
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Anthropic is trying to “destructively scan all the books in the world.” How worried should we be?
Anthropic is trying to “destructively scan all the books in the world.” How worried should we be? September 8, 2026 Illustration by Anthony Gerace; Source photographs from Getty In early 2026, the owner of James Payne, Books and Prints, based in Brooklyn, began receiving order requests that he later described as “brazen and bizarre.” The books themselves were strange—a so-called legal survival guide from 1998 titled “How to Win in Small Claims Court in New York”; an academic text from 2006 called “Cultures of Glass Architecture”—and so was the order method. Booksellers like Payne…
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