Is there any indication that Anthropic is destroying books from the 18th century? Even the BBC quote is a conditional. Emphasis added:

> "It would be a much more significant problem IF one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."

I agree with the sentiment of course but it is really a huge IF they are doing that.

IF they wanted to train on, say, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, why buy an expensive edition from the 1600s when they would get the same text from a Penguin edition for a fraction of the price? It gets much cheaper secondhand too of course.

I'll go further, why would they want to train on expensive rare and out of print books? Are they, perhaps, competing on an AI benchmark based on extensive medieval knowledge of the cosmos? There's been a lot of pearl-clutching about lost obscure knowledge but y'all really reckon that kind of knowledge is valuable to LLMs?