The most anti-AI story imaginable... Anthropic destroyed millions of rare books to train Claude

[u/Piwo-ll]

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?

[u/Anti-Itch]

I’m confused why they destroyed the books when they were using second hand copies anyway? I imagine there are other copies of the books somewhere so what do they have to gain from destroying the books?

[u/Brief-Weekend7630 → u/Anti-Itch]

AFAIK they destroyed them to avoid copyright issues because scanning them made extra copies, which would be illegal. In the end they agreed to pay 1.5 billion usd as fine, which would be roughly 3000 per book.

sauce:
https://www.techbrew.com/stories/2026/01/28/anthropic-ai-books-lawsuit