The company, according to its own description, “gathers data from various public sources like libraries and merchants to compile a vast collection of unique book data searchable by ISBN, title, author or publisher.” “Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination,” states an article published by the company. The same goes for other book sellers as to whether their activities are feeding the AI maw of physical pulverisation. Retained service providers then went about their work: stripping the book bindings, cutting the pages to size, scanning the books into digital form. “Anthropic purchased its print copies fair and square.”