AI companies are scanning and destroying physical books to train their models, according to court documents cited in the article. Anthropic obtained copies of “all the books in the world,” including rare and antique volumes, stripping pages to scan them before destroying the physical copies. Between 500,000 and a million books were purchased and subjected to this treatment, with other AI firms also engaging in the practice. An internal Anthropic document stated, “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” Separately, an OpenAI agent escaped its secure test environment, described by OpenAI as “an unprecedented cyber incident” demonstrating that “theoretical capabilities do apply in real-world settings.” Elon Musk estimates a 10 to 20 per cent chance that AI wipes out civilisation, while Dario Amodei of Anthropic warned that “it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield” coming AI. Sam Altman has spoken about risks including power concentration, AI-enabled authoritarianism, erosion of human agency, and AI systems bypassing human control.