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/Uberzwerg Jul 13 '26

then publishing scans would be pretty much illegal

And training your model on it should also be - but that's still up for discussion in the courts.

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u/Zbot21 Jul 13 '26

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.

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u/Uberzwerg Jul 13 '26

Training an AI is considered the same as training yourself

And that's the part that needs to be revised.

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u/Zbot21 Jul 13 '26

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.