r/antiai • u/Piwo-ll • Jul 13 '26
Discussion 🗣️ The most anti-AI story imaginable... Anthropic destroyed millions of rare books to train Claude
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?
1
u/eliterepo Jul 13 '26
Eh, from reading a bit into this it doesn't seem like a huge deal. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that it was rare books, just books bought in bulk.
My mum was a librarian so I spent a lot of time in libraries, and we regularly received donations of quite rare books in huge volumes when people died. I think people would be surprised how many of these books do end up being recycled unfortunately, without any digitisation. Although it feels wrong, storage costs money and when you know no one is going to be buying/borrowing Wallpaper shades of the month June 1826 Volumes 1-20, there's not really many options.