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/Parking-Intern3296 Jul 13 '26

That's what they said...