If they were simply buying the books and doing nothing with them, the public wouldn’t be able to access their copies anyway.
If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up. Hopefully someone will at least be able to purchase their digital scan and hopefully the scan is of decent quality and clearly indicates the provenance of the text.
Books are considered super high quality training data. Anthropic has no reason to get rid of this data that 1. They’ve spent a ton of money on and 2. Will remain useful indefinitely for training LLMs.
> If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up.
The same applies for a digital scan? The information isn’t any more likely to be lost.
I don't know why you're so quick to assume this will all just "work out" such that the scans are ultimately accessible. Arguably the most likely scenarios are either Anthropic survives and holds them away in perpetuity or Anthropic fails and they are sold off to the highest bidder who does the same.