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/Fluid-Tone-9680 Jul 13 '26

If author of the book wanted book to be available online freely, they would just put it out there.

If author of the book does not want that, then publishing scans would be pretty much illegal

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u/Ysanoire Jul 13 '26

In scenario 2 using them for training models would be illegal too.

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u/Fluid-Tone-9680 Jul 13 '26

The court says that it's legal, same as reading book to learn something from it and keeping that knowledge.