You should already be upset. A company with far greater resources than you has potentially prevented you from accessing a portion of the world's information. Because they haven't been transparent, you don't know. You should react to the facts, which are that a company has taken moves, largely surreptitiously to prevent you from accessing intimation. There is zero reason to assume good will in this scenario. You should demand more transparency and more insight into operations, period. Unless you have a vested interest in the company.

You understand that what you just said is true of almost every company in the United States... right?

Sorry, but I'm going to save my efforts for the people who are ACTUALLY doing bad things - not just the people who I don't like who MIGHT be doing bad things.

Otherwise it kinda seems hysterical. IMHO.

> You understand that what you just said is true of almost every company in the United States... right?

No. It definitely isn't. There are plenty of US companies, one of them large and recognizable, that actually make it their mission to give you access to information in some fashion.

We have different definitions of "bad thing". In my opinion, unilaterally potentially erasing human history is already bad. Is it the worst thing someone could do? No, probably not, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be bothered by it. I'm not sure what kind of argument you're really trying to make here.

I don't find LLMs that valuable, a few companies being the only providers of "frontier" models bothers me, and their possibly destroying works of historical interest also bothers me. Until they come out and find a way to make their scans available to the public, I'm not going to be happy about this. In my opinion, you shouldn't be happy about it either. These companies have everything to gain by making it harder for you to access knowledge (so that you are forced to pay them continuously for their "knowledge" in the form of information sparse LLM tokens). They have almost nothing to gain by enhancing your access to knowledge.

> potentially

My point is I don't understand how someone can get mad about something they're not even sure is happening.

Are you aware that the publishing industry itself has destroyed more than 500X as many books as Anthropic ever will?

Your concerns seem misguided.

But I suspect we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. You have a nice day.

> Are you aware that the publishing industry itself has destroyed more than 500X as many books as Anthropic ever will?

I'm not sure why everyone on hacker news so often falls for the "my friends are jumping off the bridge, so I can too" fallacy. Not to mention, there are clear differences between the processes under consideration, which might bother you, even if the outcome is the same. No, I don't care that publishers destroy books because usually they only do that when the book has proven to fail to sell (not the case here, clearly, since the books were sold!) and out of necessity because of resource constraints and not because they are using them to build a proprietary alternative product they plan on charging me for. I don't understand why people are engaging is such shoddy, shallow thinking here.

I think the difference in our viewpoints ultimately lies in our faith in the companies involved. I have little to no faith that the digital scans of these texts will make it out to the public based on historical behavior of companies and the current legal complications around copyright. As such, I find it grossly unfair for several companies, which have significantly more economic and logistical resources than interested individual buyers, to systematically purchase rare works and thereby prevent individuals from accessing those works, possibly in perpetuity. The point is that even if they were to eventually release these, they are effectively, as of now, as of my lifetime, no longer available. Again, we have little information on the specifics, but it's the principle of the matter, the gross asymmetry here, that bothers me. It's all worsened by the fact that they are doing this so that they can use a commodity which you could have paid for once to train a new utility, tokens, that they want to charge you for on a metered basis.

If I understand you, you seem to be more confident that they might eventually release the works, or you are less bothered by the power asymmetries here. I actually do hope you turn out to be correct, and they find a way to release the material, or at least tell us what they bought. However, I doubt this will happen.

I hope you have a good day too! Thanks for sharing your perspective on the matter.

These books are specific requests. They are sent in lists to booksellers. The booksellers are rejecting some of the rare books in the lists. Many of them are nonfiction books produced before 1990. They are clearly identified requests for specific items. They are not random. Many of them have ISBNS https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/08/17/nz-bookstores-receive-bul... it is not we are jumping off the bridge. It is we are asking for specific to buy so we can them into LLMs. Some of them are rare and they are being destroyed. The booksellers object to this because many of them believe it is their job to preserve old and rare books. It is not hard if you have a list of items and you know exactly what you want to differentiate between items that should be scanned and items that are mass produced and are readily available. This is a consistent pattern over many months very specific requests for ingestion. https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/08/10/wellington-second-hand-bo... This indicates the companies requesting them know exactly what they are looking for and probably have done some research on the books in question. It creates a further issue, when the rare books are ingested, and the books are hard to acquire or get, they are limited to existing inside artificial intelligence. This gives an advantage to control of information by the companies that have ingested them.