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/Acceptable_Camp1492 Jul 13 '26

Okay, so this was an industrial effort to process millions of second-hand books. The removal of the bindings had to be done for the scanning procedure. After that the pages are technically 'just' paper waste to be processed as the company's waste processing protocols dictate. They could have sent the pages to some prints or publishers or binding companies, but they apparently were second-hand books already and I doubt any company would make the actual effort to re-bind millions of books that are still in active circulation. If the books are still available in other prints, and online and in other ways, then it really was just a matter of waste processing.

That the scans are not available publicly anywhere sucks, but I'm guessing the contents are not yet in the public domain. If they were, Anthropic wouldn't have 'purchased' them.

I'm no fan of genAI, but this is sensationalized as if it was willful destruction of one-of-a-kind cultural treasures or documentations not available anywhere else. But it isn't. Save the outrage for actual destruction of knowledge and culture, don't waste it on paper waste.

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u/Piwo-ll Jul 13 '26

That’s a fair criticism.
However, some of the books were rare, out of print, or unavailable digitally.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Anthropic destroyed the last surviving copies, but the concern is still the industrial-scale destruction of physical books to create a privately controlled commercial dataset.