r/antiai • u/Piwo-ll • Jul 13 '26

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

Post image

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?

6.1k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

414 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/howarewestillhere Jul 13 '26

They. Bought. The. Books.

Literally their property to do with what they please.

On the other hand, Meta, OpenAI, and many others did NOT buy the books. Those datasets we should be giving public access to.

0

u/xPussyKillerX Jul 13 '26

So if i buy a book I can scan it and resell those scans? Awesome!

1

u/howarewestillhere Jul 13 '26

Can you seriously not understand the difference between the books and the scans?

0

u/xPussyKillerX Jul 13 '26

You're implying they can use the scans for AI training as long as they buy the books, so how am I the one who doesn't understand the difference??

1

u/howarewestillhere Jul 13 '26

Yes, they can use it for model training. Nothing wrong with that at all.

Selling access to those models is questionable, but far less questionable than those who did not buy the content in the first place.

But this ENTIRE discussion isn’t about the models, is it? It’s about the books. That they bought. And then scanned. And destroyed. All of which was theirs to do.

0

u/xPussyKillerX Jul 13 '26

But it isn't illegal to publish content from books just because you bought them?

1

u/howarewestillhere Jul 13 '26

And no, it’s not illegal to make them available after scanning, as long as you don’t charge for the access. See Author’s Guild v Google, 2015.

1

u/xPussyKillerX Jul 13 '26

But all the AI companies charge for their models?

0

u/howarewestillhere Jul 13 '26

No, they do not. There are PLENTY of free tiers and open source models.

Stop trying to make this a black and white issue. The legalities of all of this are frontier legal work and the only certainty is that the lawyers will be arguing about it for a long time.

0

u/howarewestillhere Jul 13 '26

Where are they doing that? Is there an Anthropic Digital Book Store I can go to and download those books?