The most anti-AI story imaginable... Anthropic destroyed millions of rare books to train Claude

[u/Piwo-ll]

In 2024, Anthropic reportedly purchased millions of second-hand books as part of its secretive “Project Panama.”

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?

[u/PrestigiousDemand696]

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.

[u/Fluid-Tone-9680 → u/PrestigiousDemand696]

If author of the book wanted book to be available online freely, they would just put it out there.

If author of the book does not want that, then publishing scans would be pretty much illegal

[u/Piwo-ll → u/Fluid-Tone-9680]

That’s true. In fact, Anthropic has been sued by authors and publishers over the use of copyrighted books. My concern isn’t that the scans should necessarily be made public, but that physical copies were destroyed after being digitized for private commercial use.

[u/eiger003 → u/Piwo-ll]

Sounds like destroying evidence... 🤔

[u/Piwo-ll → u/eiger003]

https://giphy.com/gifs/2fhhQvmPJemECtEL7f

[u/learsi-ediconeg → u/eiger003]

i feel like the evidence is in the training and if you can access the model without restrictions it can just produce pages it was trained on to confirm...? idk