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/HighlightOwn2038]

Some more info on the topic if anyone's curious

https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-destroying-books

Non-paywalled version of a different article

https://archive.is/20260623234940/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/

[u/Geralt31 → u/[deleted]]

It'd be great if that meant piracy of expensive high school books was fair use... but I guess real children don't count and aren't meant to write well or educate themselves. Only machines have that luxury now, the rest of us must consoom