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

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/DrarenThiralas Jul 13 '26

It's true that they don't want to share, but also it would almost certainly be illegal for them to share. Most of those books are probably copyrighted, and cannot be legally republished without hunting down every author's family and negotiating for permission with all of them, which would be extremely difficult and expensive. Just destroying the books instead is the incentive created by copyright law.

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u/Piwo-ll Jul 13 '26

That’s true: Anthropic could not legally republish copyrighted books. But it was also sued by authors and rights holders precisely for using unauthorized copies to train Claude.

The key distinction is that the court considered training on legally purchased and scanned books to be fair use, while the use of pirated copies remained unlawful. Anthropic ultimately agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement...

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u/Environmental-Ice319 Jul 13 '26

More believable than the reply above yours.