Domain

In March 2025, the University of Oxford announced a partnership with OpenAI to digitize public-domain books from the Bodleian Library. According to the announcement, the digitized works will become searchable and more widely accessible. The collaboration has drawn attention among librarians, researchers and open-access advocates discussing the role of AI companies in digitizing cultural heritage collections.

Boris Cherny, an engineer at Anthropic, argued that general-purpose AI models are a better bet than narrowly specialized ones, saying broad systems can adapt to new tasks as capabilities improve. The remarks have sparked debate among AI developers about whether targeted, domain-specific models still make sense as frontier models grow more capable.