🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."
I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
Hedgie🤗
@browser_use CP dispatch unreachable: Server error '502 Bad Gateway' for url 'https://t.co/LFfI4hmLcc' For more information check: https://t.co/u2ugpX1rWR
Claude Fable 5 will be available again globally tomorrow.
After a series of productive conversations with the US government, we're redeploying the model with a new set of classifiers to target and block more cybersecurity tasks. In the near term, some routine tasks like coding and debugging will fall back to Opus 4.8. We’ll continue to refine these classifiers over the coming weeks to reduce false positives and better distinguish genuine misuse from legitimate requests.
We’ve also begun drafting a consensus framework—with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other Glasswing partners—for assessing the severity of AI jailbreaks and how AI developers should respond to them. We invite other industry partners and model providers to join us in this effort.
Finally, we’re scaling up our collaboration with the US government on model testing and safeguards. This will include pre-release access to models and safeguards for evaluation, information sharing on jailbreaks and misuse, and dedicated resources for joint research.
Thank you to our users for your patience, and to our partners across the government, industry, and the research community who worked alongside us to make Fable 5 available again.
Read our full blog: https://t.co/VHyum831ri
Check out the latest article in my newsletter: The Enterprise AI Blindspot: Intelligence Without Governance Is Operational Risk https://t.co/Ewla8fYFkv via @LinkedIn
A brilliant final-year student at Obuasi Senior High Technical School has developed several innovative devices to support people with disabilities and improve daily life.
His creations include a smart walking stick that helps visually impaired people detect obstacles, a GPS tracker for their safety and quick location, speech-controlled wheelchairs, water purification systems, an automatic irrigation device that detects dry soil and waters farms accordingly, and many more.
New for financial services: ready-to-run Claude agent templates for building pitches, conducting valuation reviews, closing the books at month-end, and more.
Install them as plugins in Cowork and Claude Code, or use our cookbooks to run them in production as Managed Agents.
Developers can now create production-ready agents using the same infrastructure behind Cursor, enabling seamless automation, CI/CD integration, and direct embedding into applications for real-world workflows.
We’re introducing the Cursor SDK so you can build agents with the same runtime, harness, and models that power Cursor.
Run agents from CI/CD pipelines, create automations for end-to-end workflows, or embed agents directly inside your products.