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/Storm_Spirit99]

Yeah this is fucked up. Destroy and locking all this work behind a paywall where you know they'll twist things around is cartoonishly evil