CREATIVE DESTRUCTION? Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models: Company hired Google’s book-scanning chief to cut up and digitize “all the books in the world.”

This was a plot device in, I think, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Or was it one of his others?

UPDATE: I think I’m wrong about Stephenson. Was it Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Grok says that’s it. “In Vernor Vinge’s novel Rainbows End (2006), set in a near-future 2025, there is a depiction of a major corporation engaging in a destructive book-scanning process as part of the ‘Librareome Project.’ This project involves digitizing vast collections of books by shredding them and scanning the pieces, a process that is portrayed as highly efficient but controversial due to its destruction of physical books. This is described in a darkly comedic scene where the physical books are fed into a shredder-like machine, with cameras capturing the fragments to reassemble the content digitally.”

Rainbows End seems to be coming true right on schedule. Here’s the podcast interview Helen and I did with him back in 2006.