A settlement between Anthropic and a group of authors who sued over the use of pirated books to develop its AI, Claude, was approved on July 27, 2026. Court documents revealed that Anthropic had "cut up millions of printed books, scanned them, and used them solely for AI training, then discarded the originals." Anthropic hired Tom Turvey, former head of partnerships for Google Books' book scanning project, in February 2024 and instructed him to "obtain every book in the world." After initially collecting digital versions of pirated books, Anthropic shifted its strategy to paper books, which are considered a safer source of information. The company adopted a policy of purchasing large quantities of used books and destroying them to digitize them in-house, cutting the spines off to separate pages, scanning each page with a high-speed scanner, and converting the text via OCR before discarding all originals. This method was chosen to digitize a large number of books cheaply and quickly.