AI Firms Are Quietly Buying and Destroying Millions of Printed Books to Train Their Models
AI firms buy rare books in bulk, scan them for training data, then shred the originals, with ISBNdb handling anonymous orders.
- Anthropic executed a covert 2024 operation named "Project Panama," purchasing, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train its Claude chatbot using hydraulic machines that sliced spines before digitizing, leaving no physical copies behind.
- AI firms target pre-2022 texts because they predate AI-generated content, offering curated knowledge that web crawls cannot replicate. A federal judge ruled this "destructive scanning" constitutes fair use, as it merely replaces print with searchable digital versions.
- ISBNdb facilitates bulk orders of up to one million books for clients, often using NDAs to maintain anonymity. Booksellers report that rare, out-of-print titles with few surviving copies are frequently processed in this pipeline for data extraction.
- Critics argue the practice destroys irreplaceable human history, noting that rare 18th-century texts are sacrificed to improve marketing emails. ISBNdb states that "AI company destroys two million books" is not a headline that generates sympathy.
- The battle over training data has shifted from courtrooms to book warehouses, affecting availability for collectors and students. As institutional buyers with immense purchasing power dominate, rare titles are permanently removed from circulation, leaving no replacement copies.
21 Articles
21 Articles
AI firms are quietly buying and destroying millions of printed books to train their models
Its pitch is simple: older books offer cleaner data. "The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf," the company says on its website. "Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative."Read Entire Article
Anthropic has to pay $1.5 billion – because of illegal book downloads. But the AI company already has a new strategy to get to text cost-effectively: buy antiquarians empty. Now Switzerland also reports a striking order volume.
Inside Project Panama, Anthropic's Secret Effort To Scan and Shred the World's Books
Anthropic spent tens of millions of dollars secretly buying, scanning and destroying millions of physical books to train its Claude chatbot, according to more than 4,000 pages of unsealed court documents reviewed by the Washington Post. The operation, internally named 'Project Panama', ran from early 2024 and involved hydraulic cutting machines slicing the spines off books before high-speed scanners digitised every page. The paper was then recyc…
AI companies are trying to make their models even better through human literature. A report now reveals that millions of used books are purchased through intermediaries.
AI companies are destroying rare books for profit
As a result of a legal loophole, AI companies have taken to sourcing rare books which they are subsequently scanning and destroying. And as people have highlighted, it could mean many texts are being lost to us forever: So AI labs are buying old books by the pallet, slicing them apart, scanning the pages, and […] By Willem Moore
Elon Musk takes shot at Anthropic, says SpaceXAI will not destroy books for AI training
Elon Musk said SpaceXAI will preserve rare books and scan them without cutting the spine. The remark came as Anthropic faces scrutiny over destructive book scanning and copyright disputes.
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