BILL NUMBER: S10678
SPONSOR: GONZALEZ
 
TITLE OF BILL:
An act to amend the general business law, in relation to establishing
the literary lifecycle management or LLM act which prohibits the
destruction of rare books
 
PURPOSE OR GENERAL IDEA OF BILL:
This legislation would prohibit the destruction of rare books by making
it unlawful to intentionally destroy any book published before 1970 or
was a part of a limited print run.
 
SUMMARY OF PROVISIONS:
Section 1 amends the general business law by adding a new article 48,
defining "destruction" for the purposes of this section, prohibiting the
destruction of certain books, and includes a civil penalty with enforce-
ment by the Attorney General.
Section 2 establishes the effective date.
 
JUSTIFICATION:
Like something out of a book, court documents have revealed how Anthrop-
ic secretly bought, scanned, and destroyed books to train their AI chat-
bot. The operation, which they named Project Panama, was Anthropic's
plan to "destructively scan all the books in the world" per internal
planning documents and infuse their AI chatbot, Claude, with higher
quality communication abilities. Court documents show how Anthropic
purchased and destroyed millions of print books, reportedly including
rare titles, in their effort to produce this quality communication
outcome.
This legislation would prohibit the destruction of rare books for
commercial purposes by making it unlawful to intentionally destroy any
book published before 1970 or was a part of a limited print run. It
includes a civil penalty and additional penalties accounting for the
market cost of a book.
With the rise and rapid growth of Al, it is important to safeguard the
printed word. This is especially true of rare materials, where many
copies may not exist, and once a version is digitized, it's at the mercy
of AI interpretation and summarization. Through this bill we can safe-
guard rare materials and show big tech how New York feels about the
destruction of books.
 
PRIOR LEGISLATIVE HISTORY:
New bill.
 
FISCAL IMPACT ON THE STATE:
None.
 
EFFECTIVE DATE:
This act shall take effect immediately.