The Devouring of All Knowledge

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:55:25 -0600

I was horrified but unsurprised to read reports¹ this week of the AI companies buying, butchering, scanning, and shredding rare books at an unprecedented scale.

With all online knowledge consumed, the next source of untapped text is the abundance of physical works created before the introduction of LLMs, a point in time casually termed “the ensh**ification of all knowledge” circa 2021.² All writing before this historic point is the work of human hands and minds. Writing published after 2021 is potentially LLM-written and therefore unsuitable to be used as training data.

Anthropic on Ryan Fleck

The Devouring of All Knowledge