destroy

AI companies are buying tons of old books because they are free of AI Slop. Then they destroy them

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The impact of AI is no longer only in digital terms, but it affects frameworks as seemingly little linked to the virtual environment as second-hand books. Booksellers around the world are detecting the purchase of batches of books focused on very specific points. By crossing the data, the intentions are guessed, and again the AI ​​and its voracious need to be fed with data in an almost gargantuan way is behind it. Buyer robots. Marçal Font runs the Fènix bookstore, in Badalona, ​​and has been receiving purchases for weeks from a Canadian company that suspects it is automated: consecutive orders from the same buyer separated by just a minute. About twenty Spanish second-hand bookstores have sold to the same company since the end of April, some with orders of more than a thousand copies, almost always out-of-print non-fiction: they talk about a monograph on the castellers of Granollers from the seventies, a technical winemaking manual, conference minutes from half a century ago, diaries from the Civil War… All over the world. The same pattern is repeated in Germany, the United States, New Zealand and Australia: a Silicon Valley company has placed an order for more than 3,000 books with a Spanish bookstore. What distinguishes this type of buyers from ordinary customers is the indifference about price and the absence of thematic coherence. another example: An American bookseller went from selling twenty books in a good week to hundreds, with purchases that ignored the market value of the copy and an eye for subtlety, jumping from one topic to another with no apparent relationship. On the forums of Alibris, another book-selling marketplace, a platform official attributed the uptick to the arrival of new wholesale buyers who are hoarding commercial books. Two companies, one destination. The buyer identified in Spain is ZoomBooks, a Canadian second-hand book buying and selling company that sends orders to an Illinois logistics operator, PrepFort, in charge of scanning and cataloging the shipments. When asked, ZoomBooks denies collaborating directly with Anthropic, the company behind AI assistant Claude, and defines itself as a second-hand bookstore dedicated to recycling. Regarding the final destination of the books, and about the publications that its own website published about how to feed algorithms with used copies and destroy them later, the company responds that it does not comment on its commercial agreements because they are subject to confidentiality. Photo by Ugur Akdemir on Unsplash In parallel, another type of intermediary operates, more explicit about its function: ISBNdb, a bibliographic metadata database that now offers AI laboratories the purchase of between a thousand and a million books on request. Your own website puts it crudely: printed books before 2022 are the reserve of human text that no internet tracking can any longer guarantee, protected against contamination by texts generated by AI itself that now flood the network. Forced destruction. This commercial offer is supported by a specific ruling. Federal Judge William Alsup ruled in June 2025, in the case Bartz v. Anthropicthat training language models with legally purchased books constitutes a transformative use protected by the doctrine of fair use. He also considered it legal to digitize those copiesbut only because the printed copy disappeared in the process. That is, the digital copy takes the place of the paper book. Put another way: if the physical book survived the scan, the company that bought it would keep two copies having paid for one, and the argument of fair use would weaken. The shredder is a mandatory step in the legal process. Jason Leung on Unsplash Secret project. Months before that ruling, Anthropic was already carrying out a large-scale purchasing operation known internally as Project Panama. An internal company document, uncovered by The Washington Post based on declassified judicial documents, thus defined the action: “Scan Destructively all the books in the world.” The same document asked that the project remain hidden. ISBNdb has turned that same caution into a sales argument: it offers its clients, AI companies, a confidentiality agreement with each order and bluntly admits the image problem caused by the mass destruction of books. No headline about destroyed books generates sympathy, or as they themselves say, “destroying books gives a bad image“. What worries booksellers. Spanish second-hand booksellers have alerted the Ministry of Culture of what is happening. Miguel Ángel Ortega, president of the UNILIBER antiquarian booksellers association, recalls that his union fulfills functions of preservation and conservation of bibliographic heritage in addition to buying and selling, and it is contradictory for him to sell copies only for them to end up destroyed. Font puts it without half measures: “we are facing a form of literary plunder.” What is already protected by legal deposit and well cataloged runs less risk. But there are also “fanzines, neighborhood newsletters, local publications, documentation of social movements…” according to Font. Xavier Vinaixa, a researcher who helped uncover the case, and analyst Antonio Ortiz agree that the industry increasingly needs human text not contaminated by AI to avoid the collapse of the model, although Ortiz clarifies that the scarcity of data weighs less today than it did two years ago because training relies increasingly on reinforcement learning on already qualified data. Researcher Patrícia Ventura talks about how knowledge has to remain a public good, not a private reserve of a handful of companies. Image | Prateek Katyal in Unsplash

Antena 3 does not have Pasapalabra’s El Rosco, but it continues to destroy its substitute. Telecinco wants to fix it in court

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Antena 3 has been leading the audience in Spain for five consecutive seasons, and a good part of that dominance was built letter by letter, in the Rosco of ‘Pasapalabra’. In May, a court took away the iconic final test of his Access talisman. And three weeks after the channel replaced it with a very similar test, Mediaset intends to demonstrate that the change is not legal either. That’s why, will sue Atresmedia by AlaZ, the new final test of ‘Pasapalabra’. The judicial decision. Last May 21the Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court confirmed that the Rosco format belongs to MC&F Broadcasting Production and Distribution, and not to ITV Studios or Atresmedia. The ruling ratified a previous ruling from the Provincial Court of Barcelona in 2022 and forced Antena 3 to stop broadcasting that specific test, although the rest of ‘Pasapalabra’ could continue on the air. It is a legal dispute that comes from afar. ‘Pasapalabra’ was born in 1996 as an adaptation of the British format ‘The Alphabet Game’, from ITV, although the final test grew on its own until it became an element with its own identity. In 2019, Telecinco already lost a similar legal battle against ITV for the global rights to the program and had to withdraw it from its schedule: ITV and MC&F have licensed it separately, and that has generated problems. Atresmedia recovered the competition in May 2020, but the judicial shadow over Rosco was never completely cleared, until this year’s ruling. The substitution. On June 19, Antena 3 replaced El Rosco with AlaZ, an adaptation of the Swiss contest ‘DallAZetA’. Mediaset, meanwhile, with the exploitation rights of Rosco finally under its belt, has begun to prepare its own contest built on that test, predictably for Telecinco. Its own ‘Pasapalabra’… which cannot be called ‘Pasapalabra’ or imitate the rest of the tests. The problem is that in Mediaset’s opinion, Antena 3 continues to culminate ‘Pasapalabra’ with a Rosco that cannot be Rosco. The resemblance. The company supports its claim on the Supreme’s own definition of Rosco: two or more contestants compete against the clock answering questions whose answers follow alphabetical order. Under this criterion, Mediaset maintains that AlaZ retains almost all the essential elements of the Rosco: two contestants, a tour of the 25 letters of the alphabet, accumulated time from previous tests during the program, a cumulative jackpot and visual signaling of successes, errors and pending questions almost identical to that of the Rosco, only in a line instead of a circle. The differences. However, there are also details that distinguish both tests: The AlaZ system is more closed and strategic and the contestant can no longer give probable answers, but must guess an exact word whose length is revealed by dashes, in the style of ‘The Hanged Man’. The stopwatch also changes, from the usual 85 seconds in the Rosco to 110, and a penalty is introduced for receiving clues that does not exist in the Rosco. Of course, for Mediaset none of these adjustments alter the essentials of the game. The company states that “only minor differences have been introduced to make something substantially the same.” The comparison it offers contrasts these changes with the real differences of the original Swiss format, where a single contestant competes, there is no accumulated jackpot and each program is independent of the previous one. For MC&F and Mediaset, AlaZ is more similar to Rosco than the Swiss contest from which Atresmedia bought the license. The hearings. Since Atresmedia recovered ‘Pasapalabra’ in May 2020, the chain went from an average share of 11.7% in 2019 to around 13.9% in the following years, consolidating a leadership which has been maintained for five consecutive seasons. The most important thing is the drag effect that ‘Pasapalabra’ generates on the network’s news programs and ‘El Hormiguero’. And things have not changed with the loss of Rosco. The premiere of AlaZ, on June 19, was already a hit: the program signed 21.9% of share and 1.6 million viewers on average, with the final test shooting up to a 28.3% share in its closing minute. The new mechanics improved the average that Rosco had been recording that same season by three points. The first full week confirmed the trend, averaging 17.1% share. And that sometimes competes with the World Cup, a sporting event that has devoured the Telecinco audiences (although in July, the only weak days for Antena 3 have coincided with free-to-air World Cup matches). Without that competition, the program continues to exceed the 18% quota, a level similar to what it already had. Antena 3 has no one to complain, with or without Rosco. In Xataka | Telecinco has ‘El Rosco’ but does not have ‘Pasapalabra’. Antena 3 has ‘Pasapalabra’ but does not have ‘El Rosco’

Jeff Bezos says AI won’t destroy jobs. He then launched a company to create artificial engineers

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Jeff Bezos is one of the representative figures of current technological optimism regarding artificial intelligence. While in the United States we are seeing the university students who boo to those who claim that AI is the new industrial revolution due to pessimism when it comes to finding a job, Bezos point that this pessimism around AI is “the opposite of reality.” Come on, young people are wrong because what AI is going to do is create jobs. At the same time, Bezos has returned to talk of Prometheusa startup that will open the door to fewer workers being needed… while increasing productivity. It’s a bit of a mess, but it makes sense to Bezos. Prometheus. It is not a model or a technology, but a startup. Founded by Bezos in 2024, it has about 150 employees spread across headquarters in San Francisco, London and Zurich and already has a valuation of $41 billion. The central purpose of Prometheus is to develop AI systems capable of assisting in the entire engineering process from start to finish (end to end, as they call it). This means that the system will cover from the initial design of physical products to their manufacturing and launch, passing through all the simulation and testing phases. It is like a kind of artificial general engineer and does not seek to be just something that supports the engineers, who will then create the physical products. His goal is… that, to be a physical engineer. Accelerate inventions. Beszos’ goal is to empower engineers to be able to invent things more quickly and easily. An example is that this AI product is capable of carrying out all the aforementioned steps to build, for example, a jet engine. And here is the twist, since a jet engine is something extremely complex, but what Bezos is looking for is that what the startup develops allows smaller teams to do much bigger things in much shorter cycle times. Landing it: if before 100 people made you a new generation jet engine, now 10 can make it for you. I don’t know, Rick.… We suppose that in his head it is a good way to reassure those young people worried about the future of work, but in case it is not clear, Bezos commented that the fear of AI and the future of work is “the opposite of reality”, pointing out that what Prometheus does will be a catalyst for work. The curious thing is that he has presented it in a slightly strange way. If AI makes work cheaper, faster and easier, employment will increase because, “even though the number of people needed is being reduced by 10, technology will create opportunities to multiply those jobs by 10.” They are a bit strange accounts, but the boss of Amazon gives as an example a two-person household in which only one will have to work because productivity thanks to AI will be much greater. It does not say what that other person will do or if, thanks to AI, that member of the household who continues to work will earn more to replace one who stays at home. What it suggests is that there will be such a massive increase in productivity that not everyone will have to work, a somewhat questionable message because bills are not paid with productivity, but with money. colossal background. But well, beyond Bezos’ curious message, Prometheus is valued at $41 billion and has raised $12 billion from investors such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, apart from Bezos himself. And, currently, it is in deals to raise a fund of 100,000 million. But Bezos isn’t the only one moving to build AI startups. We have the founders of Uber, Coinbase or Robinhood (curious name) building new companies around this technology boom due to something that these profiles are very clear about: It is a new golden era and the best way to start a company. Young Americans are not so clear. In Xataka | Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, on the possibility that we are facing a work apocalypse: “It’s nonsense”

Saudi Arabia had billions to build the future in the desert. He has decided to sacrifice them to destroy Iran

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The cranes have stopped roaring in the Tabuk desert. There where it should rise a colossal artificial lake at 2,600 meters high and a science fiction metropolis valued in billionsToday the priority is to look at the sky looking for the trail of ballistic missiles and kamikaze drones. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) had promised the world a glass and petrodollar utopia called NEOM, a monument to his own ego designed to whitewash the regime’s image. However, the harsh reality of the Middle East has ended up imposing itself on the renders in 3D. A crossroads in the gulf. We are looking at what is now, for all intents and purposes, a Third Gulf War, and Saudi Arabia has reached a historic crossroads. Caught in the war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran, the Saudi monarchy faces an existential dilemma: save its economy and its megalomaniac pharaonic project, or take advantage of the chaos to dismantle, once and for all, the regime in Tehran. And judging by the shadow movements of its leaders, Riyadh seems willing to let its economic utopia bleed if it means it can win this war. Facing the gallery. Behind closed doors, Saudi Arabia’s message is one of absolute containment. In recent communicationsthe Saudi government has insisted that it has “always supported a peaceful resolution” and that its only priority is defending its population and infrastructure from daily attacks. This is what an analysis by Dr. Turki Faisal Al-Rasheed has defined as “strategic patience”: a tactic in which Riyadh avoids direct confrontation to protect its investments, while subtly encouraging the weakening of its regional rival. The reality is more complex. However, the leaks tell a very different story. As revealed The New York TimesBased on sources informed by US officials, MBS has been privately pressuring US President Donald Trump not to stop the war. The crown prince sees the current US-Israeli military campaign as a “historic opportunity” to destroy Iran’s hardline government. The talks have reached the point where MBS would have advocated for ground operations and even the military takeover of Kharg Island, the Iranian oil heart. The diplomatic board is abuzz. Mohamed bin Salmán’s phone does not stop ringing, as he urgently needs to shield his vital infrastructure from attacks and, to do so, he relies on the Western umbrella. As detailed ReutersBritish Prime Minister Keir Starmer personally telephoned MBS to condemn the Iranian offensive and confirm the deployment of more British defensive military equipment. London’s goal is to protect the kingdom and try to ensure that the sea trade route does not completely collapse. But while MBS is piling up shields and secretly pressuring Trump not to relax the blow against Iran, other regional allies are desperately trying to put out the fire before it devastates the entire Gulf. As revealed by the agency AnadoluPakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif contacted the crown prince to underline the “urgent need” for a de-escalation. Islamabad’s move is not a toast to the sun: Pakistan has emerged as the great shadow mediator, to the point of offering to host direct talks between the United States and Iran based on a 15-point American peace plan. The sacrifice of Vision 2030. “It’s the last thing he wanted. He wants stability and order, he doesn’t want missiles or drones flying.” This is how forceful an expert seemed consulted by him Financial Times. The diplomatic “detente” that Saudi Arabia had signed with Iran in 2023 has been shattered. Iranian retaliatory attacks have hit the giant Ras Tanura refinery, the Shaybah field and the Prince Sultan air base. The cost of this war for MBS’s dreams is already incalculable. Formula 1 had to cancel its April races. In the entertainment sector, the CEO of Savvy Games Group recognized that the war escalation It will “cool the perception” of Saudi Arabia as a safe destination for investment of 38 billion in eSports. The biggest collateral victim: NEOM. The artificial lake project Trojenaawarded for $4.7 billion to an Italian construction company, is already facing leaks about delays of between three and four years. The 2029 Winter Games have been postponed indefinitely and the extra costs suffocate an already deficient budget. The war and instability in the Red Sea discourage foreign investment, vital for these science fiction cities to go from render to reality. The reality of the Saudi coffers is critical. As revealed The New York TimesEven before the conflict broke out, the crown prince was already facing serious financial challenges. The 2030 deadline is approaching and the government assumes budget deficit forecasts for the coming years, suffocated by excessive spending on megaprojects and vast investments in artificial intelligence that are straining the country’s resources to the limit. And a prolonged war threatens to blow everything up, since MBS’s success depends on a single factor that is currently non-existent: a safe environment for investors and tourists. Holding the pulse. To withstand the challenge, Saudi Arabia has had to resort to an engineering work born of fear in the 80s. With the Strait of Hormuz strangled by the Iranian threat, Riyadh has activated its logistical “antidote.” State oil company Aramco is pumping against the clock through the East-West Pipeline, a 1,200 kilometer pipeline that crosses the desert to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. The objective is to move up to 7 million barrels a day by land, avoiding Tehran’s missiles. The landscape in Yanbu is like something out of a movie: an “army” of at least 25 supertankers (VLCC) crowds on the coast to evacuate some 50 million barrels. However, there are no magic solutions. The port has a physical funnel (it can only load between 4 and 4.5 million barrels per day) and, in addition, ships must cross the Bab al-Mandab Strait, exposing themselves to the Houthi rebels. Added to this is that the pipeline only moves crude oil, leaving markets such as Europe without their vital supplies of refined products such as diesel, exacerbating the global energy … Read more

destroy the radars that collect the most

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Madrid has a problem with some of its most profitable radars: there are those who destroy them. The situation has become so worrying that the Civil Guard itself is asking for specific surveillance to control the acts of vandalism that, for more than a year, have been repeated in the community. The problem. Cabin radars at key points such as the M-607 or the M-505 are being vandalized more frequently than usual. From using white paint to “blind” them to destroying them with stones or even inserting objects inside them after breaking the glass to cover their cameras. The figures. Some of these radars, such as the fixed one on the M-607 that limits a section of the highway to 80km/h, have been repaired only to be vandalized again the next day. In the case of one of the radars located on the M-505, between Galapagar and El Escorial, it suffered damage before even being fined. A year and a half after its assembly, it has not been able to start fining. “They repaired it and the next day they destroyed it again by putting a traffic signal pole inside.” “AUGC (Unified Association of the Civil Guard)”. Repair the damage of a fixed speedometer ascends about 70,000 euros (67,000 for a fixed radar and 66,000 for a section radar). The very high cost, according to the DGT, is due to the amount of technology they incorporate: character recognition system, synchronization with GPS satellites, laser illumination cameras, etc. The consequences. According to articles 263 to 267 of the Penal Code, those who cause damage to public property can face prison sentences of one to three years. There are already those who have been arrested for breaking a radar and have had to end up asking for donations on Facebook to meet the damages claimed. nothing new. there are those He destroyed three radars in Malagaat the beginning of the year the DGT investigated the vandalization of seven othersand newly installed radars such as the one on the Granada ring road lasted just three months without sabotage. Although the DGT assures that radars are an active safety measure for drivers, at the end of 2025 the collection record was broken, with nearly 540 million euros in penalties for fixed, section, mobile, velolaser and radars captured by Pegasus helicopters, among others. The performance. Given the drama of the destroyed radars, the Civil Guard requests additional surveillance. In this type of situation, the DGT reinforces the number of agents from the Traffic Group of the Civil Guard and those from Citizen Security for surveillance in the most conflictive points. The less formal nuance: it is not so easy to prosecute this type of crime without constant surveillance, and even more so considering that there are nearly 4,000 speed radars installed in Spain. In Xataka | How to know all the official locations of the DGT radars

The US has decided to shoot itself in the foot and destroy one of the best AI companies in the country

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Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, published a few hours ago a statement in which he announced something unusual: the Department of Defense (DoD) has confirmed that “we have been designated as a risk to the national security supply chain” of the United States. This agency thus fulfills the threat it posed a few days ago and automatically turns Anthropic, one of the best AI companies in the country (if not the best) into a pariah company. What implications does that have? Many and all of them huge. I veto Anthropic. This designation prohibits Anthropic from doing business or developing projects for the US military. That is already serious, but it is not just the Pentagon, for example, that will not do it: any company that works with the Pentagon is also prohibited from using Anthropic’s AI services for any government project. We are facing a decision whose collateral effects could be terrible for Anthropic. The loss of revenue could be massive, and if other federal agencies follow the Pentagon’s lead, Anthropic could have a hard time defending its viability against its competitors. That designation is not immediate, and there will be a transition period six months for DoD to migrate to other vendors (like OpenAI). It had never been done with a national company. The ban on Anthropic is absolutely extraordinary, and that designation as a “supply chain risk” was a measure historically reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei. By applying this label to an American company, the DoD severs its commercial ties and marks the company with a stigma, a kind of “scarlet letter” that could scare away global investors and partners. ethical shock. The core of the conflict is not technical, but moral. Anthropic was born as a spin-off from OpenAI with the aim of avoid existential risks in the development of AI models, and the company has always positioned itself as a great defender of alignment with human values. Its CEO, Dario Amodei, insisted that its AI could not be used for mass surveillance or for the development of lethal autonomous weaponsbut that has collided head-on with the US government and military establishments, which wanted practically total access without restrictions, except those imposed by the US Constitution and laws. to the courts. Amodei has explained in its statement that it will fight the decision in court. His argument, he explains, is that statute 10 USC 3252 It is a tool of protection, not punishment. The defense will need to focus on showing that the Department of Defense did not use the least restrictive means to ensure security. If they succeed, they could invalidate the designation, although the reputational damage has already been done. The dilemma of sovereignty. Can a private company be above the Government? The Pentagon argues that no supplier can slip through the chain of command, and one thing is certain here: for an AI to have usage clauses that limit military operations is to cede national sovereignty to a private algorithm and the terms of service of a board of directors and a CEO who have not been democratically elected. The threat of extreme interventionism. This unusual measure could end up setting a precedent. If the government punishes companies that ask uncomfortable questions or place limits on the use of their technology, AI innovation could change its philosophy. Companies that want to survive would have to do so without questioning the orders out of pure fear of bankruptcy and bankruptcy. Transition period. There is, however, a period of six months granted for the transition and that seems to make it clear that the Pentagon still depends on Anthropic technology for current operations, as demonstrated by the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro or the current intelligence analysis of the conflict in Iran. It remains to be seen how events will evolve, but the outlook for Anthropic is certainly worrying. And for the rest of the companies too, if indeed justice rules in favor of the Department of Defense. Image | Anthropic | Xataka with Freepik In Xataka | Anthropic has become the Apple of our era and OpenAI our Microsoft: a story of love and hate

Anthropic wanted to secretly scan and then destroy millions of books to train its AI. It hasn’t been so secret

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A language model for AI needs input if it is to be trained to be more accurate and effective. The issue is how the information is obtained and whether there is an ethical way to do it that is profitable for the technology company in power. There is no doubt that the preferred option for companies has been to use all possible physical and digital content without anyone’s permission. There is also evidence. A judicial leak reveals that Anthropic invested tens of millions of dollars in acquiring and digitizing literary works without permission from the authors. According to account Washington Post, the project, internally called “Panama”, was part of a frenetic race among big technology companies to accumulate massive data to train their artificial intelligence models. How it all started. The Panama Project was launched by Anthropic in early 2024. According to internal documents revealed per the Washington Post, the goal was to “destructively scan every book in the world.” Furthermore, these documents also explicitly state that the company did not want anyone to know that they were working on it. In about a year, the company spent tens of millions of dollars buying millions of books, cutting their spines with hydraulic machines and scanning their pages to feed the AI ​​models that power Claudeits star chatbot. According to the media, the books, once digitized, ended up being recycled. Because has come to light. The details of the project have been revealed in a lawsuit for infringement of rights copyright filed by literary authors against Anthropic. Although the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion to close the case in August 2025, a district judge decided to make more than 4,000 pages of internal documents public last week, exposing the entire operation. They are not the only ones. Court documents reveal that other technology companies such as Meta, Google and OpenAI had also participated in this race to obtain massive information to train their models. According to revealed According to the documents, an Anthropic co-founder theorized in January 2023 that training AI models with books could teach them “how to write well” instead of imitating “low-quality internet slang.” On the other hand, an internal Meta email from 2024 described access to a digital library of books as “essential” to be competitive with rivals in the race to dominate AI. However, the documents revealed by the media also show how Meta employees expressed concern on several occasions about the legality of downloading millions of books without permission. An internal email from December 2023 indicates that the practice had been approved after being “escalated to MZ,” apparently referring to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. According to court records to which the media has had access, the companies did not consider it “practical” to obtain direct permission from publishers and authors. Instead, they found ways to mass-acquire books without the writers’ knowledge, including downloading unauthorized copies from third-party sites. Chat logs from April 2024 show an employee asking why they were using servers rented from Amazon to download torrents instead of Facebook’s own. The answer: “Avoid the risk of tracing” the activity back to the company. Data torrent. The documents to which the Washington Post has had access also they test that Ben Mann, co-founder of Anthropic, personally downloaded over 11 days in June 2021 a collection of books from LibGen, a gigantic library of copyrighted content. The outlet further revealed that, a year later, in July 2022, Mann celebrated the launch of the ‘Pirate Library Mirror’ website, which boasts a massive database of books and openly claims to violate copyright laws. “Just in time!!!” Mann wrote to other Anthropic employees, according to the outlet. Anthropic stated in legal documents that it never trained a revenue-generating business model using LibGen data nor did it use Pirate Library Mirror to train any full model. Anthropic’s legal solution. According to point the medium in its article, faced with the legal risk, Anthropic changed its strategy. The company hired Tom Turvey, a Silicon Valley veteran who had helped create the project Google Books two decades earlier. Under his direction, Anthropic considered purchasing books from libraries or secondhand bookstores, including New York’s iconic Strand bookstore. The company ultimately ended up buying millions of books and stacking them in a giant warehouse, often in batches of tens of thousands, according to court filings. The Washington Post assures In addition, the company worked with used book sellers in the United Kingdom. A project proposal mentions that Anthropic sought to “convert between 500,000 and two million books in a six-month period.” What the law says. Most legal cases against AI companies are still ongoing, but the media mention two court rulings that have considered that the use of books to train AI models without permission from the author or publisher may be legal under the “fair use” doctrine of copyright. In June 2025, District Judge William Alsup determined that Anthropic had the right to use books to train AI models because they process them in a “transformative” way. He compared the process to teachers “teaching schoolchildren to write well.” That same month, Judge Vince Chhabria ruled in the Meta case that the authors had not shown that the company’s AI models could harm the sales of their books. In the Anthropic case, the physical book scanning project was considered legal, but the judge determined that the company may have infringed copyright by downloading millions of books without authorization before launching Project Panama. The final agreement. Instead of facing a trial, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to publishers and authors without admitting guilt. According to point According to the media, authors whose books were downloaded can claim their share of the settlement, estimated at about $3,000 per title. Cover image | Emil Widlund and Anthropic In Xataka | If AI is going to leave us without jobs, in the United Kingdom they are already seriously discussing the solution: a universal basic income

The plan has always been to destroy the International Space Station in 2030. Someone thinks we can do something else

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The International Space Station this that falls. It has been orbiting the Earth since 1998 and was completed in 2011. The plan was to retire it in 2024, but the accounts did not work out and, in 2021, the NASA administrator set a definitive date: 2030. The question is whether it will last that long because a few months ago we already said that members of NASA expressed concern about the accumulation of problems technicians who were accelerating the decline of a seriously aging facility. air leaks, cracks in different modulesabsence of spare parts for critical systems and lack of budget to propose a solution It would be assumed that the Different agencies have been putting patches on for years. NASA has already commissioned SpaceX the development of a ship that would tow it to the space graveyard of the Pacific, but… is there no other solution for the 450-ton, $150 billion station? The answer is yes. At least, that’s what Greg Vialle, founder of a startup called Lunexus Space that is committed to recycling the International Space Station, thinks. Turning the International Space Station into a mine In the middle of last year, NASA had clear that he Point Nemoa remote location in the Pacific, 2,700 kilometers from the nearest pile of dirt, would be the station’s cemetery. There was only one thing I could avoid the dismantling: that ROSCOSMOS, the Russian space agency, refused to abandon the ship. Russia soon changed its mind by commenting that its cosmonauts were passing more time repairing equipment than conducting experiments. Come on, no matter how much they wanted to “annoy” NASA at a geopolitically unstable point, it didn’t work out for them. Everything was aimed at the disappearance of the current ISS, but there are those who have something to say. Lunexus Space is a startup focused on the development of industrial infrastructure in low orbit that reuse structures and space junk to facilitate the construction of goods directly in the lower atmosphere. The goal is to develop a kind of circular economy in low orbit by taking advantage of the tons of material already in space, eliminating the need to re-launch them from Earth. In Space Newsthe CEO of the company has developed an article in which he explains his plan to “avoid wasteful expenses.” Vialle affirms that the ISS has 430 tons of high-quality aluminum, titanium and other materials valuable for future space missions. He estimates the value of the material at $1.5 billion, which would be lost to the ocean floor if NASA’s plan goes ahead. And it also points out the almost 1 billion that NASA will spend on the vehicle that tows the station to its resting point. “It is a fiscally irresponsible plan that loses a strategic resource and a golden opportunity.” What he proposes is “a common sense alternative”: converting old infrastructure into raw materials for new construction. Their calculations highlight that launching a kilogram of material into space costs $3,500, but if they take materials from the ISS, the costs would drop entirely. And, faced with the 1,000 million dollars of the plan to sink it, Vialle suggests that Its recycling process could be carried out for about 300 million dollars to which an equivalent government loan would have to be added to launch the necessary infrastructure, appealing to significant savings for taxpayers while preserving valuable resources. American leadership, of course “How can we wait prospect, mine, refine and transport in deep space if we cannot extract the many tons of cataloged and space-grade materials that are already beginning to manage low Earth orbit?” Vialle appeals. But of course, there is a B side to this plan: Strengthen America’s Space Leadership. By receiving the ISS, the CEO believes that the seeds of “a new industry in space led by the United States will be sown, ensuring our economic and strategic leadership over competitors like China.” China too He has been planning his own station for years. And he compares the move to American manufacturing policy to prepare for the Second World War, japanese strategy in the 1970s that established the country as a technological miracle or Taiwan’s position with TSMC and chip manufacturing. His idea is for the United States to invest in resource management technologies in space, something that is taking its first steps and that, if it reaches a solid program, will make “the nation dominate the future of commerce and defense in orbit.” It is evident that Vialle has known what sticks to play in a moment as sensitive as the current one and, although in his letter he urges Congress to influence NASA’s decision to ‘deorbit’ the International Space Station, the space agency has already detailed that, after a session to evaluate the possibility of reusing the main components of the station, they did not receive any proposals of interest from the industry. On the other hand, the European Space Agency already pointed out that recycling in orbit was “a real challenge” and it was not clear whether the resources used to capture and process waste in space would be profitable. Either way, time is of the essence. We will see what happens with the ‘Recycle the ISS’ movement, but there are four years left and, as more and more voices point out, something must be decided because the installation is on its last legs. In Xataka | Decathlon has just made its way beyond sport: it will reach space with a prototype spacesuit for the ESA

PLD Space already has a complete Miura 5 rocket ready. to destroy it

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The renders are over. PLD Space has once again demonstrated that it is advancing at a devilish pace by publishing the first photos of the entire Miura 5 rocket. These images are history of the Spanish space industry. With you, the Miura 5. The first complete unit of the Miura 5 is not made to fly, but to suffer. Named QM1 (Qualification Model 1), has been almost completely assembled for integration testing of all subsystems before the final flight model takes off into Earth orbit next year. This is the first orbital launcher from a Spanish company, the same one that successfully launched the Miura 1 suborbital rocket from Huelva in October 2023. It was that milestone that has allowed PLD Space to complete the development of a rocket in record time. No other European company has done it so quickly. Why it is important. At a time when preserving sovereign access to space It has become a geopolitical issueEurope needs to have a strong aerospace industry and cheaper and more versatile rockets than the Ariane 6 and Vega C developed by ESA. The Miura 5 leads the European New Space thanks to its TEPREL-C biokerosene and liquid oxygen engines, more powerful than its competitors and developed internally by PLD Space in its Elche factory. The rocket measures 35.7 meters high, has two stages (the first with five engines, and the second with an engine adapted to the vacuum of space). The next steps. The first stage of the QM1 will perform a full propellant loading test known as “wet dress rehearsal.” They will fill the tanks, pressurize the vehicle as they would before a flight, and replicate all the structural and thermal loads prior to launch, without actually turning on the engines for takeoff. The second stage will be sent to the United States to test the Flight Termination System (FTS). Basically, it will be destroyed to validate that the explosive charges are capable of safely disintegrating the rocket in the event of an in-flight anomaly. PLD Space expects to have the second qualification unit ready in December. The first Miura 5 designed to fly will arrive shortly after. He is scheduled to travel to French Guiana in the first quarter of 2026. Images | PLD Space In Xataka | PLD Space has a detailed plan to become Europe’s rocket factory. And the pieces have started to fit

The dangerous Tiktok fashion that can destroy your smile

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Have perfect teeth with a good aligned and especially completely white It is not easy to get. But given this aesthetic need, there are many products that have been viralized that promise rapid dental whitening, ‘natural’ and under cost that They have been viralized in networksand everyone has in common that they use activated carbon. A product that has flooded the market, but that According to experts Consulted by Infosalud can have a completely contrary effect. Miracle. We all want to have a miraculous solution for our problems, and above all it does not cost us too much effort. In this case, activated carbon tooth pastes seemed ideal to have the perfect smile without having to go through the annoying dental whitening that they can do to us in a specialized clinic. But, as the saying goes, ‘the cheap is expensive’. The product. Activated carbon is a very porous black powder that is obtained from materials such as coconut shell or wood. In a classic way it has been used In the hospital sphere Because of their ability to absorb toxins, so it has been used to treat those who suffered an poisoning produced for example by a drug overdose, as it has surely been seen on some occasion in a film or series to be very appealed. And using this property of ‘entrapment’ is where marketing lies behind that activated carbon can be the perfect bleach. They precisely sell it through the ability to ‘catch’ ‘and eliminate teeth spots, leaving them whiter. Reality. Despite its great popularity, there is no solid scientific evidence that supports what the influencers say. An article published in 2023 entitled “Effectiveness and abrasiveness of activated carbon as a bleaching agent: a systematic review of in vitro studies” wanted to give a little light. After analyzing 208 articles on this matter, they could conclude that dental pastes based on activated carbon have a lower bleaching effect “than other alternatives and can be considered as less safe due to their high abrasive potential.” Also the American Dental Association (ADA) opted for making an article where literature on this subject is analyzed, and saw that abrasive nature is a big problem. The consequences. Having an abrasing effect causes enamel wear irreversibly, since it is not regenerated. And once the enamel is wearing up, the dentin is exposed, an internal yellowing layer, which can cause precisely an opposite effect to the one who wanted to be: perfectly yellow teeth. But ending this protection layer makes the tooth nerve more exposed, which makes an external stimulus such as cold or heat the sensitivity increases much greater. This is something similar to what can be felt after finishing a dental whitening treatment in a clinic. The negative effects do not stay here. The rough texture of coal can irritate the gums, causing inflammation and even gingival recession. And if we also add that many pastes with activated carbon do not have fluoride, we can also find long -term decay. The experts. They have a fairly unanimous opinion regarding the use of this type of products. As Infosalus collects, the president of the Council of Dentists of Spain points to these pasta “do not eliminate spots, or bleach the enamel in a quick and economical way.” But it adds to “the use of activated carbon in the teeth can mean serious oral health problems.” Safe alternatives. In the case of wanting a smile as if Photoshop had been done, it is best to go to a dentist to receive the best tips. In this case, advice on treatments that have been scientifically tested may be received. For example, there are whitening pasta that do have evidence when using polish agents such as carbamide peroxide or hydrogen peroxide in low concentrations that are completely safe and effective for daily use and have the support of health authorities. Images | Tony Litvyak Chris Slupski In Xataka | We are a little closer to fulfilling the dream of the dentists: teeth that grow again

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