Bilyeu says reports on Anthropic ‘millions of books’ destructive scanning are overblown

What was said

"Uh also, uh I did some more research on this. This seems to be overblown a little bit. They did, I think it was Anthropic, reached out to a bunch of these bookstores. The vast majority of them never even replied to them. Uh there's no evidence that they got millions of books and are destroying these."

Responding to reporting about AI training data sourcing and “destructive scanning” of books, Tom Bilyeu says he believes the scale of the practice has been exaggerated. He claims most contacted bookshops did not respond and adds he has seen “no evidence” that millions of books were obtained and destroyed, while arguing digitisation can preserve knowledge in a more usable form.