What's trending in AI right now, from the app charts to the community feeds. Real links, our take.
Anthropic's book-shredding story is going viral
A video about Anthropic's book scanning operation has been getting over 6,000 views per hour this week, which tells you this story has moved well beyond tech news. The short version: court documents revealed that Anthropic ran a project to buy physical books, remove their spines with a hydraulic cutter, scan the pages to train Claude, and discard the originals, including rare volumes with very few surviving copies. Futurism has a solid summary of how the operation worked and why book preservationists are alarmed. The recurring point in comments is that other major scanning projects, like Google Books and the Internet Archive, do this non-destructively.
ChatGPT is closing in on one billion weekly users
The Information reported this week that ChatGPT's weekly active user count is approaching one billion, roughly seven months behind when OpenAI originally targeted the milestone. PYMNTS has the details, including context on how this growth rate compares to other big consumer platforms. ChatGPT already crossed one billion monthly active users back in June, making it the fastest app ever to do so. The weekly number is the next mark to watch.
Meta AI is back near the top of the app charts
The standalone Meta AI app is sitting at number 4 in productivity this week. It has been a chart fixture since April, when the launch of Meta's Muse Spark model sent the app jumping from position 57 to number 5 on the U.S. App Store in a single day. TechCrunch covered that surge and what the model can do. Worth knowing that this is a separate app from the AI already built into WhatsApp and Instagram, and it handles voice, text, and images.
Free AI video tutorials are flooding YouTube
Several tutorials about making long, realistic AI videos for free are pulling over 1,000 views per hour right now, with versions in English, Spanish, and Hindi all showing the same pattern. The timing tracks: the AI video category has been pulling in serious money, including PixVerse raising $439 million in July, and the free tiers from major tools have gotten good enough to actually be useful for short clips. People are discovering this and sharing the how-to.
Note-taking apps are getting a second look
Evernote made the biggest jump in this week's productivity charts, climbing seven spots. The app launched a major update earlier this year that added AI meeting notes, semantic search, and a built-in AI writing assistant, and the product team has kept shipping updates since. A separate app called Summary: AI Note Taker also climbed three spots to number 14 this week. Both movements together suggest the note-taking category is getting fresh attention now that AI features make it feel meaningfully different from what these apps were a couple of years ago.