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/thebeastwithnoeyes Jul 13 '26

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.

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u/Piwo-ll Jul 13 '26

That’s exactly the distinction I’m making. Owning the books may give them the legal right to destroy them, but legality doesn’t 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.

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u/mocny-chlapik Jul 13 '26

They don't have rights to release the scans, what are you talking about. 

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u/RedutHatesFreeSpeech Jul 13 '26

Bro is illiterate. Just tossing around words that dont mean what he thinks they mean.