Yes!

Creating personal copies of copyrighted works are allowed. (Also, libraries really don't mind if you take pictures of the content of works they have.)

Well LLMs dont make personal copies they make commercial copies.

I didn't say if LLMs are allowed do that, I said that humans are allowed to do that.

What do you mean with "then took the scans home"? Anthropic et al didn't buy all the books in the world and kept them for themselves.

Correct, they torrented them. I just wanted to stick to the library analogy of the parent comment.

Therein lies the rub: they didn't buy them... They pirated digital copies of them.

See, e.g.: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...