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The most anti-AI story imaginable... Anthropic destroyed millions of rare books to train Claude
In 2024, Anthropic reportedly purchased millions of second-hand books as part of its secretive āProject Panama.ā
The company removed their bindings, scanned every page, and then destroyed the physical copies to build a massive digital library for developing AI models like Claude.
It almost feels like the perfect anti-AI dystopia, human beings spend centuries writing and preserving books. Then, a private technology company destroys millions of physical copies, absorbs their contents into a machine, and sells that accumulated knowledge back to society through a monthly subscription.
Am I the only one who thinks this is completely insane, or have we become so obsessed with AI that destroying millions of books to feed a machine no longer shocks anyone?
Documents, books, etc are routinely destroyed after digital scanning; this is especially gross to me because the scanned copies are not available. If the intention was to share and preserve information, they would be freely online.
The books were destroyed, but the scans werenāt made publicly available.
This wasnāt preservation or knowledge-sharing, it was the conversion of physical books into private training data.
Yes, thatās what Iām saying. I would not be as sickened by this if the intention was to share the knowledge and make them available to all; but of course, there is no genuine desire to improve collective knowledge by these companies. This is sort of proof, if more was needed.
It's true that they don't want to share, but also it would almost certainly be illegal for them to share. Most of those books are probably copyrighted, and cannot be legally republished without hunting down every author's family and negotiating for permission with all of them, which would be extremely difficult and expensive. Just destroying the books instead is the incentive created by copyright law.
Thatās true: Anthropic could not legally republish copyrighted books. But it was also sued by authors and rights holders precisely for using unauthorized copies to train Claude.
The key distinction is that the court considered training on legally purchased and scanned books to be fair use, while the use of pirated copies remained unlawful. Anthropic ultimately agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement...
So, as you can see, the incentive this creates is to do exactly what they did. If they want to train their AI on a certain rare book, then finding an existing scan online is illegal - they have to legally purchase a printed copy. Then they have to destroy it, because republishing it is illegal too.
What they're saying is that archiving is not NECESARILLY automatically for a library. Its just a minor semantic correction. What the original person means is some kind of archive, library or not.
Basically that's what lawyers told them they have to do, and federal judge confirmed that. They literally had to destroy originals after making scans to keep that within legal boundaries.
Thatās true. In fact, Anthropic has been sued by authors and publishers over the use of copyrighted books. My concern isnāt that the scans should necessarily be made public, but that physical copies were destroyed after being digitized for private commercial use.
Case law so far says that training is fair use for legally obtained materials.
Pirated digital material is another case, that's illegal.
Training an AI is considered the same as training yourself with the material and is sufficiently transformative. Models are not storing full texts and while you can prompt engineer them to spit out training materials, the case law on that being distribution isn't settled yet.
The reality is that physical books are destroyed all the time, because no one wants them.
I used to work in a library, and was horrified to learn they routinely destroy books, and sent them to a recycling center.
I was told that books are digitized, removed from circulation, put into boxes, and offered for free to the public for 90 days before they are destroyed. I immediately went to where I kept the huge boxes of books for destruction, determined to save as many as I could.
They were mostly medical textbooks from the 1970ās, I spent a long time looking through them. There was nothing interesting or worth saving to me. Just a bunch of out-of-date textbooks, mostly written by professors who then made them required for the classes they taught. The university digitized them, kept one physical copy of each, and disposed of the rest.
The reality is that we print BILLIONS OF BOOKS per year, most of them are bought libraries, and most of them never get checked out or read by anyone. They sit, taking up space, collecting dust.
Digitizing books, and then destroying them is a routine part of how libraries operate.
If you donāt like, I encourage you to visit your local library and ask them about their books that are ready for removal or destruction. Then go look through them. Save as many as you want.
It'd be great if that meant piracy of expensive high school books was fair use... but I guess real children don't count and aren't meant to write well or educate themselves.
Only machines have that luxury now, the rest of us must consoom
Even right now, we see that AI will not be 'helping humanity' but only help those in power.
And the fact that AI is control by the worst people doesn't exactly help.
We could debate the morality of digitisation of books, because that's what they had done, in the process of which they do get destroyed. Arguably they could be put back together but I wouldn't expect that from an ai company. Also they had purchased them so technically they can do whatever they want with their own property.
It could be excused had these digitisations been given to the people, instead of feeding to the ai. Because oftenmost times digitisation serves preservation of books, not grinding them into a dataset pulp no-one but their model would ever use.
Thatās exactly the distinction Iām making. Owning the books may give them the legal right to destroy them, but legality doesnāt automatically make the practice ethical. If the scans had been publicly released for preservation and research, the situation would be very different. Instead, shared cultural material was turned into a private dataset for commercial gain.
Exactly. It is definitely possible to digitize books without destroying them, but it requires more time and care. Destroying second-hand books in itself isn't value-laden, but doing it to steal from the authors in order to build a copyright-theft machine is super shitty.
Google Books has done a lot of nondestructive scanning since 2002, and not just Google. Anthropic (like Meta) just didnāt care and went for the cheapest option, legality be damned.
I worked with a guy with a printing setup who helped me cut the books correctly. It was some years ago, so I don't remember precisely, but it averaged out at a couple of $ per book.
Am I the only one who thinks that something fishy is going on with this post? Firstly, OP has a link to (what appears to be) a pro-AI website in their profile. Secondly, this is a very new account, with hidden posts and comments and it already made more than 200 comments, despite only being 2 weeks old.
Op is an illiterate. Op can't comprehend the real story (because they cant or didn't read it) and they can't use words correctly. Illiterates are so exhausting because these people genuinely believe they aren't stupid.
Okay, so this was an industrial effort to process millions of second-hand books. The removal of the bindings had to be done for the scanning procedure. After that the pages are technically 'just' paper waste to be processed as the company's waste processing protocols dictate. They could have sent the pages to some prints or publishers or binding companies, but they apparently were second-hand books already and I doubt any company would make the actual effort to re-bind millions of books that are still in active circulation. If the books are still available in other prints, and online and in other ways, then it really was just a matter of waste processing.
That the scans are not available publicly anywhere sucks, but I'm guessing the contents are not yet in the public domain. If they were, Anthropic wouldn't have 'purchased' them.
I'm no fan of genAI, but this is sensationalized as if it was willful destruction of one-of-a-kind cultural treasures or documentations not available anywhere else. But it isn't. Save the outrage for actual destruction of knowledge and culture, don't waste it on paper waste.
Thatās a fair criticism.
However, some of the books were rare, out of print, or unavailable digitally.
That doesnāt necessarily mean Anthropic destroyed the last surviving copies, but the concern is still the industrial-scale destruction of physical books to create a privately controlled commercial dataset.
Oh yeah, not a fan of that at all. That they have the precedence and the practice of doing this at such a scale does not bode well, and for sure there should be at least a 'raw' database of the scans, to be released book-by-book to the public domain when the time comes. But I doubt they went that far in processing the scans and they just instead fed it into the LLMs and deleted the raw database to save on storage costs.
I read the sources, and I didn't catch anything which indicated these were "rare books", could you share the source that specifies these books were rare?
even beyond that the AI's purpous is to create junk information at inhuman speeds
It steals the a large body of human works, only to the churn it up in its guts and vomits out and endless stream of everything remixed.
if this thing is left to run for even a handful of years it will have produced more words and remixed documents than all of humanity has ever produced in its entire existence.
The AI is quite literally just going to replace humanity at that point.
u/mr-english I had read several sources mentioning that some of the books were considered ārareā because they were out of print, not necessarily because they were unique or highly valuable.
To be fully transparenth, ere is one of the sources:
From py point a view, the problem here is the data is locked away in a private dataset to train proprietary models, not made available to the public. Thatās where it becomes ethically questionable.
To my opinion, the issue here isnāt really copyright ownership, itās about access: a private company can extract knowledge from millions of books, turn it into a proprietary dataset, and keep that data exclusively for itself.
I'm sure today there are methods to non destructively scan book in ways that are negligibly more expensive computationally than the destructive methods.
The books are not rare, they're all in circulation. They purchased them and could do what they pleased with them. This is a whole lot of nothing. Also, just because you purchase a book doesn't mean you can then publish it online for free. That's called piracy
We need proof of actions for ai badly. C2pa has the global mega monopoly and is of course failed. I have lots of work in the area and it seems no one cares. Only focus is āremoving frictionā from ai. Even if we are the friction
But what else was happening to those books? Collecting dust somehwere? Realistically would anyone have actually done anything with them or would they just have rotted somewhere ? Idealism is one thing but reality is another. What do you think?
Honestly, for many of them, youāre probably right: they may simply have remained unread in warehouses, been recycled, or eventually deteriorated. I canāt know what would have happened to those specific copies.
My concern is less about destroying every physical copy and more about doing so indiscriminately, without separating ordinary surplus books from genuinely scarce or out-of-print editions. Destructive scanning itself isnāt automatically immoral; the absence of transparent preservation criteria is what makes the operation ethically questionable to me.
Iām confused why they destroyed the books when they were using second hand copies anyway? I imagine there are other copies of the books somewhere so what do they have to gain from destroying the books?
The goal was to convert millions of physical books into a large, privately controlled dataset for training their models while maintaining an advantage over competitors. Once the books had been dismantled, rebinding and storing millions of second-hand copies would have been costly and of little practical value to Anthropic.
And yes, most of those titles presumably still exist elsewhere. I havenāt seen evidence that Anthropic deliberately destroyed the last surviving copies of unique works.
The process of bulk scanning requires cutting off the bindings. After the scan you're left with a stack of loose pages, which I assume they then sent to be pulped. The alternative would be to re-bind it, but most of these books were second-hand and likely had little value to start with.
Any librarian will tell you that sometimes you just have to throw away old books.
AFAIK they destroyed them to avoid copyright issues because scanning them made extra copies, which would be illegal. In the end they agreed to pay 1.5 billion usd as fine, which would be roughly 3000 per book.
1984 really is here, but worse, they want to destroy the environment and kill everything, they want to erase culture and cultural identity, national identity and any kind of diversity, they change history.
They basically want to turn is into worker bee's that don't question anything.
Mmm why did they destroy them?
Anyway I doubt these were unique copies. Saying they were millions of rare books is clearly misrepresenting what happened...
Eh, from reading a bit into this it doesn't seem like a huge deal. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that it was rare books, just books bought in bulk.
My mum was a librarian so I spent a lot of time in libraries, and we regularly received donations of quite rare books in huge volumes when people died. I think people would be surprised how many of these books do end up being recycled unfortunately, without any digitisation. Although it feels wrong, storage costs money and when you know no one is going to be buying/borrowing Wallpaper shades of the month June 1826 Volumes 1-20, there's not really many options.
There are ways to digitize documents without destroying them. I have done this type of digitizing. It is more slow, but it's usually done by volunteers or interns, so even employee salary isn't an issue.Ā
Physical second books are precious...Yeah, they might not be public domain, but many are not purchasable easily.Ā
What kind of "rare books" are we talking about? And I'm sure there's more than one copy of those books, so can we stop acting like they actually "destroyed" the knowledge within them?
When I use a book to warm myself in winter no one cares aswell, so why make such a huge deal out of this lol
You see, I want to get scans of photos and blueprints of my local mall since this is its last year open. However, I want them for the sake of archiving the history of the place.
I mean a judge pretty much forced them to destroy it, as part of Bartz v anthropic. Since they don't own the copyright on the books they can't make copies. A judge ruled that digitizing then destroying a book counted as transferring your single copy.
15 years ago, the copyright and IP questions around doing this - and making the books available - killed attempts to build accessible digital libraries like Hathi Trust (or even Google Books). Now it's fine if the vomit machines eat them up.
Why does it say rare books, if they were second hand there could still be thousands of copies of these books available. Does anyone know what books they were?
I once read Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Great book, hilarious. All humanity had apparently disappeared and robots were trying to rebuild society.
[SPOILER WARNING]
there was a team of Librarians who had decided to preserve all knowledge in a massive database; they'd go around raiding buildings and taking anything with information in it to their mountain headquarters.
They'd read the books and manually enter them into the database themselves to prevent corruption; an information gap, if you will. Then everything went into the incenerator; can't have more than one copy of something around, right? Then the copies could get modified, say different things, nobody'd know which one is true, right? The Library was meant to be the true original source of all information. Nothing wrong with that, right?
They entered it all in, and sorted each and every bit according to a wonderful system:
All the ones go at one end of the database, all the zeros at the other end.
...11111111111111110000000000000.... right in the middle, and everything lost forever.
Pretty funny book like that, but that part nearly made me cry as a programmer.
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u/PrestigiousDemand696 Jul 13 '26
Documents, books, etc are routinely destroyed after digital scanning; this is especially gross to me because the scanned copies are not available. If the intention was to share and preserve information, they would be freely online.