Anthropic has drawn criticism following revelations it has been cannibalising millions of print books to feed its ravenous learning systems. WTF AI companies are purchasing large quantities of used and rare books. Scanning their contents to train models. The court ruled that while using text to train AI models constituted fair use, the company had acquired the titles without the consent of authors. This seems perverse given the books aren’t being reproduced as autonomous texts, but collections of disjointed phrases used to train chatbots.