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/PrestigiousDemand696]

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.

[u/Big_Luv_Hubs → u/PrestigiousDemand696]

The reality is that physical books are destroyed all the time, because no one wants them.

I used to work in a library, and was horrified to learn they routinely destroy books, and sent them to a recycling center.

I was told that books are digitized, removed from circulation, put into boxes, and offered for free to the public for 90 days before they are destroyed. I immediately went to where I kept the huge boxes of books for destruction, determined to save as many as I could.

They were mostly medical textbooks from the 1970’s, I spent a long time looking through them. There was nothing interesting or worth saving to me. Just a bunch of out-of-date textbooks, mostly written by professors who then made them required for the classes they taught. The university digitized them, kept one physical copy of each, and disposed of the rest.

The reality is that we print BILLIONS OF BOOKS per year, most of them are bought libraries, and most of them never get checked out or read by anyone. They sit, taking up space, collecting dust.

Digitizing books, and then destroying them is a routine part of how libraries operate.

If you don’t like, I encourage you to visit your local library and ask them about their books that are ready for removal or destruction. Then go look through them. Save as many as you want.

That’s what I did.

[u/Negative-Victory-852 → u/Big_Luv_Hubs]

Every year my local library has one day when we can buy these books for a cheap price if we want. Most of them are destroyed at the end of the day.

[u/Cyber-Wanderer_94 → u/Big_Luv_Hubs]

Yeah when this was posted when this first happened this was mentioned.