Anthropic shredded millions of physical books to train its Claude AI model — and new documents suggest that it was well aware of just how bad it would look if anyone found out. From the way the lawsuit documents tell it, Anthropic turned literally ripping off books into an art form. Before it turned to physical books, the company first relied on digital ones. (Anthropic denied using the pirated books to train any of its commercial models. But while Anthropic’s shredding of used books was deemed legal, the use of pirated ones was not, leading to the $1.5 billion settlement.)