As investigative outlet 404 Media previously reported, AI companies are purchasing large quantities of rare books, using high-speed scanning equipment that cuts off the spines to digitize them, and then shredding and destroying the physical originals.
Musk reposted the report yesterday and said:
I have asked the SpaceXAI team to properly preserve all rare books in the library and scan them using non-destructive methods, rather than directly cutting off their spines for scanning.
According to reports, Anthropic, one of the major AI companies currently involved in copyright litigation, spent millions of dollars purchasing large quantities of physical books to extract their content for training the Claude AI model, and then destroyed the books.
Non-destructive scanning typically uses overhead scanners, flatbed scanners, or V-shaped scanning devices to digitize books without disassembling them. Destructive scanning, by contrast, involves directly taking books apart and feeding each page into a high-speed industrial scanner. Because destructive scanning is more efficient and less expensive, AI companies generally choose this method, ultimately resulting in the destruction of millions of physical books.