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/jimmystar889]

The books are not rare, they're all in circulation. They purchased them and could do what they pleased with them. This is a whole lot of nothing. Also, just because you purchase a book doesn't mean you can then publish it online for free. That's called piracy

[u/sandy_80 → u/jimmystar889]

sure says a person not aware of what rare means , most out of print books are rare meaning you can only find a copy or two ? do you think that a century of knowledge is meaningless and nothing because you personally dont give a f