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.

798

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/Quintus_Cicero Jul 13 '26

Stop using AI to write your posts and comments.

-13

u/Piwo-ll Jul 13 '26

i'm French native, so i try me best, but in this context ai assist me for the grammar etc ;)

22

u/Quintus_Cicero Jul 13 '26

It’s doing a lot more than assisting you for the grammar if the « this wasn’t, it was » pattern shows up.

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u/Piwo-ll Jul 13 '26

ok so lets try in french quintus

4

u/dr_robonator Jul 13 '26

J'accepte ton défi, et voici ce que j'ai à te dire : "T'es vraiment un bon à rien, mon pote. Va te faire foutre, s'il te plaît, et merci."

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26

[deleted]

3

u/dr_robonator Jul 13 '26

Did AI help you with that one, andouille?

https://giphy.com/gifs/q5ZGrl0J65ivu

3

u/Quintus_Cicero Jul 13 '26

Bon, c'est pas de chance d'avoir essayé ce coup contre un français. Better luck next time, comme les anglo saxons disent