What did Joe Rogan say about Anthropic scanning and destroying books for AI?

Joe Rogan's team pulled up reports that AI companies, including Anthropic and Amazon, buy physical books in bulk, cut off the spines, scan the pages for training data and shred the originals. They read about an internal Anthropic effort called Project Panama, revealed in court documents, and a $1.5 billion settlement over millions of books. Rogan was alarmed that the project was given a code name. He was also told that a court had found the scanning was fair use. Jimmy Carr wondered whether books written before 2022 would become more valuable.

• Carr called AI a covers band that gives back versions of what humans already made, and cited Iain McGilchrist's work on the left and right brain.
• Rogan disagreed, calling it egocentric to think creativity is uniquely human.

▸In their words

“I think that we will get to the point where it will be able to do everything that we do, including all that.” Joe Rogan · at 2:07:43 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on The Joe Rogan Experience (2026-10-28). Read the whole episode summary →

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