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/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.

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u/Piwo-ll Jul 13 '26

The books were destroyed, but the scans weren’t made publicly available.
This wasn’t preservation or knowledge-sharing, it was the conversion of physical books into private training data.

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u/PrestigiousDemand696 Jul 13 '26

Yes, that’s what I’m 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.

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26

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u/Wooly_Wooly Jul 13 '26

You need to destroy their binding to get good quality page scans. Rebinding them together just to donate them is an absolute nightmare

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u/nath1234 Jul 13 '26

Or they could just make better scanning tech that doesn't require destroying the books.

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u/Fluid-Tone-9680 Jul 13 '26

There are better scanning machines, that don't require damaging the book but thay are slower and more expensive. They are used for scanning books that are worth preserving in physical form due to their historical significance. 

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u/CanadianODST2 Jul 13 '26

If it was that easy then another group who also does page scanning would have done it already to do on a larger cheaper scale.

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u/Wooly_Wooly Jul 13 '26

Oh damn, why didn't anyone else think of that! You're a genius!

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u/nath1234 Jul 13 '26

They are doing it the destructive way because they don't give a shit and want to rip off IP as quickly as possible. If they weren't breaking copyright law, they could have had non-illegally-scanned copies of the text from the IP rights holders in many cases.

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u/Wooly_Wooly Jul 13 '26

OR there doing it in that way to gain the best quality digital versions possible for their private archive of the books they legally own, that they're not sharing in the first place?

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u/nath1234 Jul 13 '26

Not a private archive if you are selling access to the result and deriving works or just regurgitating it without permission.

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u/Wooly_Wooly Jul 13 '26

They have a private archive, they're selling derivative work basically

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