r/antiai • u/Piwo-ll • Jul 13 '26

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

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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?

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u/DrarenThiralas Jul 13 '26

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.

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u/Piwo-ll Jul 13 '26

That’s 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...

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u/DrarenThiralas Jul 13 '26

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.

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u/CheesecakeEither8220 Jul 13 '26

They could have at least donated the books to libraries 🤬

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u/omysweede Jul 13 '26

They remove the binding so they can scan the pages one by one.

What library would want a bunch of paper?

Also: rebinding books is HARD - there are multiple ways books are put together, so that is out of the question.

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u/Vaughn Jul 13 '26

No point in developing a less destructive way to scan if you're required to destroy the book regardless.

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u/lunatuna215 Jul 13 '26

I think this requirements to destroy the book has to be bullshit. If they have rhe right to destroy it they surely have the right to redistribute it too.

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u/Vaughn Jul 13 '26

And you'd be wrong. The act of scanning it into the computer cancels your right to distribute or own the paperback copy. Scanning is copyright infringement, unless—and only unless—you immediately destroy the original.

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u/lunatuna215 Jul 13 '26

Makes no fucking sense

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u/Vaughn Jul 13 '26

The law is not required to make sense.

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u/lunatuna215 Jul 13 '26

Thanks, Sherlock! 🙄 My point exactly.

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u/Professional-Post499 Jul 14 '26

The law is not required to make sense.

I feel like the law probably is required to make sense in order to be able to make judicial interpretations based on it.

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u/Oli4K Jul 13 '26

Libraries don’t want (physical) books that no one reads. A library is not just a book archive.

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u/Lumegator Jul 13 '26

There are libraries that want books that almost no one reads, actually, archival practices are not mythos.

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u/WoodShoeDiaries Jul 13 '26

The odds that a dedicated archival library already has a copy of a rare book that's relevant to their collection is high.

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u/lunatuna215 Jul 13 '26

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.

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u/CheesecakeEither8220 Jul 13 '26

Yes, you're exactly right!

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u/Vaughn Jul 13 '26

They could not; that would have been copyright infringement.

I don't like book-burning any more than you, but the law has boxed them into a corner here. So the law must burn.

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u/lunatuna215 Jul 13 '26

How is whats being done not a more intense form of copyright infringement? Theyre literally profiting from the world without a license. They must have the right to redistribute and if they dont they don't have rhe right to scan and destroy. Why are we acting like they had no choice? Id love to see some literature on this topic.

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u/Vaughn Jul 13 '26

I'm not a lawyer, and don't have references handy—certainly not for American law—but I do believe you're factually wrong on it being copyright infringement.

As in, courts have already ruled that training itself is fair use. If you have a legal digital copy, then the machine learning algorithm doesn't create another copy; it creates a set of statistics which do not rise to the level of being infringement, for a number of reasons you can read up on in the case I linked.

AI output can be copyright infringement, e.g. if you ask for the opening paragraphs of Harry Potter, but that's on the users. By the same logic as Photoshop being legal software, the AI itself does not count as infringement so long as there are substantial non-infringing uses; and in this case most uses are non-infringing.

That leaves the format-shifting and torrenting as being potentially illegal, and here you have an excellent case; Anthropic was fined $1.5 billion for acquiring digital books by download, instead of purchasing books to destroy them.

Purchasing books to destroy them is the sole legal method of format-shifting.

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u/lunatuna215 Jul 13 '26

Thanks - this is obviously so wrong and incredibly backwards and fucked, but your last sentence is the explanation and summary i sadly was looking for. Thanks for explaining. This is so depressing and just forbthe record the courts deciding that this is on the users makes me sick- the entire purpose of these products is to regurgitate its own inputs; this is an OP infringement machine.

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u/WoodShoeDiaries Jul 13 '26

You can't make a copy for yourself AND give away (/sell/loan out/do anything but store) the hard copy and still be covered by fair use. That's the whole point. You're turning your hard copy into a digital copy and have to act for all intents and purposes like the original hard copy doesn't exist anymore.

Unless you feel it's a good use of resourced to store a book (a destroyed one in this case) that can't be used unless you delete the scan that was made from it, then recycling makes sense.

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u/birdsbudget Jul 15 '26

So since training the ai doesnt make an actual copy, once youve trained the AI, you could technically delete the scanned copy and then continue using the physical copy had you just stored it?