Speaking of Amazon, @elonmusk, why not sell books on X? Not just ebooks and audiobooks. Interactive books that talk back, powered by @grok. Read, listen, ask anything. All within X. We’re building this at Atticus with top authors and publishers. xAI already powers our AI stack.

🦔Someone is buying Japanese used books by the ton. Not novels or comics. Philosophy, history, medical law, Edo-period cultural texts. Multiple buyer accounts all ship to one logistics center in Okayama Prefecture that won't answer questions. Export records show over 50 tons, roughly 100,000 volumes, shipped to the US since last year. No buyer has been identified. Separately, court documents confirmed Anthropic's "Project Panama" bought millions of books in the US, cut the spines off, scanned them, and shredded the originals. An internal memo said the goal was to "destructively scan all the books in the world." Similar operations have been reported across Europe. My Take Anthropic's US book operation came out in court filings earlier this year. Project Panama. Millions of books, cut the spines off, scanned, shredded. Their VP chose the codename so nobody outside the company would find out. That story broke and apparently the same operation just moved to Japan. Anonymous buyer accounts, a warehouse in Okayama that won't take questions, and 100,000 volumes of specialized academic texts that nobody buys to resell. I don't know how you build a trillion-dollar industry on material you had to acquire in secret through middlemen because you knew the public would object. Authors spent years on those books and now they're fed through a scanner and thrown away so a chatbot can sound smarter. If the data was free to use, they wouldn't need codenames and anonymous warehouses. The lawsuits over who owns this material have barely begun and I think the copyright exposure across the whole AI industry is enormous. Anthropic's internal memo said the goal was every book in the world, which describes the foundation of the product. Hedgie🤗

The detail that should stop the publishing industry cold: they're buying used books. Which means the author whose work is being ingested doesn't see a cent… not from the sale, not from the scan, not from the model. There was always a version of this where you ask first and pay for rights. We're building it @readwithatticus

Incredible @Disneyland hack I used this week with my 2 oldest daughters (8, 6yo): Used GPT4o to plan our entire day, loaded all guest info and ride preferences into a thread the night before, then regularly fed it real-time ride data and wait times from the Disney app. It told us where to go, how to get there, when to use Lightning Lane passes, when to order food, and could adjust on the fly at any point if we wanted to change things up. Probably the most effortless, efficient and enjoyable experience we’ve had at the park.

We’re going to see more and more announcements like this one. Authors and publishers are being stolen from by most large AI companies, who ingest their copyrighted works to train models without permission. The good news: we are building an outlet and framework that enables rights holders to control and profit from the use of their IP in LLMs.