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AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late
annas-archive.gl/blog, 2026-08-05
A guest post by Anna’s Archive volunteer “u” (translated from Chinese).
TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.
Several AI companies are acquiring large quantities of secondhand books through intermediaries, scanning and destroying them, all to obtain training data “untouched by machines” from before 2022.
Anthropic’s “Project Panama” was exposed in a $1.5 billion copyright settlement. In early 2024, they launched this highly confidential project. The company has spent tens of millions of dollars purchasing millions of paper books, scanning them, training its Claude LLM, and then destroying them all. It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible, but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.
So why destroy physical books? Behind it lies the AI race and the interests of capital:
It prevents these books from being scanned and used for training by competitors. It avoids legal risks. Destroying books is cheaper than lossless scanning.
After AI companies massively scan and destroy physical books, they become the only ones in the world with digital copies. Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers.
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