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Unredacted files reveal Anthropic’s ‘secret plan’ to ‘destructively scan all the books in the world'
(www.thebookseller.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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That's quite a claim, I'd like to see that. Just give me the prompt and model that will generate an entire Harry Potter book so I can check it out.
I doubt that this is the case as one of the features of chatbots is the randomization of the next token which is done by treating the model's output vector as a, softmaxxed, distribution. That means that every single token has a chance to deviate from the source material because it is selected randomly. In order to get a complete reproduction it would be of a similar magnitude as winning 250,000 dice rolls in a row.
In any case, the 'highly transformative' standard was set in Authors Guild v. Google, Inc., No. 13-4829 (2d Cir. 2015). In that case Google made digital copies of tens of millions of books and used their covers and text to make Google Books.
As you can see here: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Sunlit_Man/uomkEAAAQBAJ where Google completely reproduces the cover and you can search the text of the book (so you could, in theory, return the entire book in searches). You could actually return a copy of a Harry Potter novel (and a high resolution scan, or even exact digital copy of the cover image).
The judge ruled:
In cases where people attempt to claim copyright damages against entities that are training AI, the finding is essentially 'if they paid for a copy of the book then it is legal'. This is why Meta lost their case against authors, in that case they were sued for 1.) Pirating the books and 2.) Using them to train a model for commercial purposes. The judge struck 2.) after citing the 'highly transformative' nature of language models vs books.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
This is the same study as the other reply, so same response.
No it isn’t. Read.
You're right, I just compared the author list to the news article and not to the paper. Sorry, took me a bit to absorb that one.
Yeah, it's an interesting paper. They're specifically trying a different method of extracting text.
I'm not taking the position that the text isn't in the model, or that it isn't possible to make the model repeat some of that text. We know 100% that the text that they're looking for is part of the training set. They mention that fact themselves in the paper and also choose books that are public domain and so guaranteed to be in the training set.
My contention was with the idea that you can just sit down at a model and give it a prompt to make it recite an entire book. That is simply not true outside of models that have been manipulated to do so (by training them on the book text for several hundred epochs, for example).
The purpose of the work here was to demonstrate a way to prove that a specific given text is part of a training set (which useful for identifying any potential copyright issues in the future, for example). It is being offered as proof that you can just prompt a model and receive a book when it actually proves the opposite of that.
Their process was to, in phase 1, prompt with short sequences (I think they used 50 tokens like the 'standard' experiments, I don't have it in front of me) and then, if the model returned a sequence that matched the ground truth then they would give it a prompt to continue until it refused to continue. They would then 'score' the response by looking for sections in the response where it matched the written text and measuring the length of text which matched (a bit more complex than that, but the details are in the text)
In order to test a sequence they needed 52 prompts telling the model to continue, in the best case, to get to the end/a refusal.
The paper actually gives a higher score than ~40%. For The Great Gatsby, a book which is public domain and considered a classic, they achieved a score of 97.5%. I can't say how many prompts this took but it would more than 52. The paper doesn't include all of the data.
Yes, you can extract a significant portion of text of items that are in the training set with enough time and money (it cost $134 to extract The Hobbit, for example). You can also get the model to repeat short sentences from text a high percentage of the time with a single prompt.
However, the response was to a comment that suggested that these two things were both combined and that you could use a single magical prompt to extract an entire book.
The core of the issue, about copyright, is that a work has to be 'highly transformative'. Language models transform a book in such complex ways that you have to take tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of samples from the, (I don't know the technical term) internal representational space of the model, in order to have a chance of recovering a portion of a book.
That's a highly transformative process and why training LLMs on copyrighted works was ruled to have a Fair Use exemption to claims of copyright liability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
https://lemmy.world/post/42628249/21949167
That study is six months old. The one I linked is from three weeks ago.
It was Meta and only 42%.
https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/06/study-metas-llama-3-1-can-recall-42-percent-of-the-first-harry-potter-book/
The claim was "Yet most AI models can recite entire Harry Potter books if prompted the right way, so that’s all bullshit."
In this test they did not get a model to produce an entire book with the right prompt.
Their measurement was considered successful if it could reproduce 50 tokens (so, less than 50 words) at a time.
Even then, they didn't ACTUALLY generate these, they even admit that it would not be feasible to generate some of these 50 token (which is, at most 50 words, by the way) sequences:
For context: These two sentences are 46 Tokens/210 Characters, as per https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer.
50 tokens is just about two sentences. This comment is about 42 tokens itself.
Start with the first line of the book (enough that it won't be confused with other material in the training set...) the LLM will return some of the next line. Feed it that and it will return some of what comes next, rinse, lather, repeat - researchers have gotten significant chunks of novels regurgitated this way.
This doesn't seem to be working as you're describing.
That's what I read in the article - the "researchers" may have had other interfaces they were using. Also, since that "research" came out, I suspect the models have compensated to prevent the appearance of copying...
I'm running the dolphin model locally, it's an abliterated model which means that it has been fine tuned to not refuse any request and since it is running locally, I also have access to the full output vectors like the researchers used in the experiment.
I replied to another comment, in detail, about the Meta study and how it isn't remotely close to 'reproduces a full book when prompted'
In they study they were trying to reproduce 50 token chunks (token is less than a word, so under 50 words) if given the previous 50 tokens. They found that in some sections (around 42% of the ones they tried) they were able to reproduce the next 50 tokens better than 50% of the time.
Reproducing some short sentences from some of a book some of the time is insignificant compared to something like Google Books who will copy the exact snippet of text from their 100% perfect digital copy and show you exact digital copies of book covers, etc.
This research is of interest to the academic study AI in the subfields focused on understanding how models represent data internally. It doesn't have any significance when talking about copyright.
I agree, but that doesn't stop journalists from recognizing a hot button topic and hyper-bashing that button as fast and hard and often as they can.