AI Companies Are Destroying Millions of Books for Training Data—Here's What's Really Happening
16 Sources
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Are AI Companies Really Destroying Books?
Despite the panic online, there are plenty of unanswered questions. Last week, the internet raged as social-media posts and news articles accused AI companies of "destroying the world's books" -- including "millions of rare" ones -- by chopping off their spines to scan them more easily, and
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Booksellers fear their rarest books are being pulped to feed AI. The trail leads to a 'recycler'.
AI firms want old books because they are free of AI slop. Now Australian booksellers fear the rare and irreplaceable ones are being sliced up and pulped to feed the machines. We have written about why AI companies are buying up old books: printed before the internet filled with machine-made text,
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Millions of books are reportedly being slaughtered to train AI -- here's what Anthropic told Tom's Guide
The dismantling of classic literature for AI upgrades is disheartening Mention the term "AI" to anyone in the know and it's likely to make them squirm in disgust. Even though the most popular models have proven to be helpful digital assistants for numerous tasks, the companies behind those AI
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Why is Anthropic destroying books? | Kathryn James
The AI company apparently found destructively scanning 'all the books in the world' easier than dealing with copyright in its quest for training data Should we destroy all the books in the world? An answer to this question can be found in the court documents of Bartz v Anthropic PBC. The northern
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Millions of books face destruction as AI companies race for training data
AI is now killing centuries-old book volumes that survived wars * ISBNdb ships up to a million books anonymously to AI labs * Pre-2022 books are prized because chatbots never touched their text * Spine-cutting scanners destroy originals to speed up digitization for training AI companies are
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AI companies are buying and destroying old books for training data
AI companies have spent years pulling training material from the internet. Now, as more of the web fills with AI-generated writing, some are looking for text in a place largely untouched by chatbots: used-book shelves. Until July 28, ISBNdb, a company that operates an online book database,
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This Dutch bookseller thought a request for 3,000 copies was 'spam or phishing.' Instead, AI companies are scanning and destroying books to train AI | Fortune
It was just another sunny summer day in Haarlem, Netherlands, when an unusual request landed in Dutch antiquarian bookseller Pieter de Vries' inbox. A woman named Natalia, identifying herself as being with a company called "2077AI," was looking to source what she described as a "fairly large
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Project Panama: How Anthropic shredded books to train its AI chatbot
Recently unsealed court documents reveal how Anthropic secretly bought, destroyed and scanned books to train its AI chatbot, Claude. It sounds like a Ray Bradbury story come to life. Somewhere in America's sprawl of warehouses, book spines were sliced by machines like cuts of salami. Scanners
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Company that said it could scan and destroy books for AI data-harvesting has deleted that part of its website: 'no such service was ever brought to life'
Remember the story about AI companies destroying millions of copies of books while scanning them to use as training data? In terms of bad optics, "destroying books" is right up there with kicking puppies, which is why the AI companies relied on third-party rebuyers to obfuscate what they were
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'More than just objects': Australian book sellers raise alarm over 'horrific' destruction of rare titles to feed AI
Secondhand booksellers believe they may have been caught up in the AI supply chain that sees old books scanned then destroyed "Sometimes books tell you more than the content," says Tim White, as he lines up carefully dust-jacketed books and pamphlets in plastic sleeves on temporary shelves in
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AI companies are reportedly buying up and destroying millions of old books for training
According to a new report from 404 Media, AI companies are not only using books to build and train powerful AI models, but they're also destroying them. Yes, to digitize millions of books in a way that saves them time and money, AI companies are removing spines and individual pages to make the
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Suppliers Scramble As Rare Books Destroyed To Train AI
ISBNdb says their controversial books-to-AI pipeline landing page was 'a test of market interest' after disgust of a program straight out of Fahrenheit 451 This week, heavy readers and casual posters alike were aghast at emerging reports of rare books being mulched in bulk as a sacrifice for LLMs.
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Buy, scan, destroy: AI firms are shredding millions of books to train their chatbots
AI companies are buying, cutting apart and scanning millions of physical books to train chatbots, according to a Washington Post report based on newly unsealed court filings. The documents reveal Anthropic's secret "Project Panama" and shed light on similar book-acquisition efforts by Meta, OpenAI
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AI burns books? Tech giants are buying, shredding books to train smarter chatbots
AI companies are buying and then destroying millions of rare books to prevent AI slop content that consumers are vocally against, 404 Media reported last week. Silicon Valley tech giants are paying companies and contractors to buy up rare books, which are then scanned in a high-speed machine that
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AI's hunger for data is now consuming rare books and booksellers are cashing in
Artificial intelligence firms are purchasing vast quantities of physical books. These books are scanned to train large language models and then destroyed. Rare and out-of-print titles are particularly sought after for this purpose. Booksellers report a significant surge in demand for these older
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Project Panama: Scanning And Book Destruction At Anthropic
Book burning. Book pulping. Book vandalising. It's all the fashion and, dare one say it, the rage. Libraries are carting them off to the dump. Repositories of memory are being shredded in favour of supposedly more useful digital formats. And now, Anthropic's hungering for books, not as sources of
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AI firms are buying and destroying millions of physical books to train large language models like Claude AI. Anthropic's secretive Project Panama uses destructive scanning—cutting spines and pulping originals—to digitize pre-2022 texts free of AI-generated content. Booksellers worldwide report mysterious bulk orders, raising fears that irreplaceable rare volumes are being lost forever.
Anthropic's Secret Book Destruction Program Exposed
Court documents from the copyright case against Anthropic have revealed a secretive operation called Project Panama, described in internal memos as "our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world."
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The AI company explicitly advised employees to use a codename "because we don't want it to be known that we are working on this."4
Documents unsealed in the Bartz v Anthropic PBC case show that in spring 2024, Anthropic spent millions of dollars purchasing millions of new and used books specifically to destroy them for AI training data.1
The destructive scanning process involves stripping books from their bindings, cutting spines and edges, feeding individual pages through high-speed industrial scanners, and discarding the paper originals as trash.
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Anthropic hired logistics managers, sourced books from vendors, and housed them in warehouses where staff moved between neatly stacked and labeled shelves before the volumes were shredded and disposed of.4
The company settled with authors for $1.5 billion after a class action lawsuit revealed it had kept 7 million pirated books in a central library.3
Source: Tom's Guide
Why AI Companies Target Pre-2022 Books
AI companies are specifically hunting for books published before 2022 because these texts are guaranteed to be free of AI-generated content.
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Large language models like Claude AI need "well-curated facts, well-organized analyses, and captivating fictional narratives" to improve their ability to predict language outcomes and write as compellingly as human authors.4
Training AI on its own output can cause model collapse, a phenomenon where models degrade significantly in quality when fed machine-generated text.1
Books represent one of the best sources for complex, high-quality, long-form text that is "dense, edited, authoritative," unlike internet content increasingly filled with AI slop.
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Pre-2022 volumes also avoid deliberate data-poisoning techniques that authors increasingly use to disrupt AI training.5
Anthropic chose destructive scanning over securing copyright permission for existing e-books because dealing with copyright represented a "legal/practice/business slog" that the company preferred to avoid.4
Mysterious Bulk Book Purchases Alarm Booksellers
Booksellers worldwide have reported strange waves of unusually large orders through platforms like AbeBooks and Biblio.
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Charlie Becker, manager of Becker's Books in Houston, told reporters that 95 of the past 100 books ordered through one platform went to a single buyer, with one order totaling 70 books.1
The orders are price-insensitive and oddly random—one Australian bookseller received three boxes in May pairing a 1970s soil-mechanics manual with a $9 poetry book that had sat unsold for 20 years.2
The books are almost entirely nonfiction, mostly published from the 1970s to the 1990s, written in various languages, and include titles like "The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver from 1995" or "How to Use Corel WordPerfect 1991."
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In many cases, shipping costs exceed the books' resale value.1
Australian secondhand booksellers traced many orders to Zoom Books, a Canadian "book recycler" that offers strict non-disclosure agreements keeping customer identities confidential.2
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The Rare Book Question Remains Unanswered
Source: Fortune
While most books in bulk orders appear to be common out-of-date titles, booksellers fear that irreplaceable rare volumes are entering the pipeline.
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Delfina Manor in Victoria drew the line when she realized some orders might include only known copies of certain works.2
Nick Dawes, who keeps about 500,000 books, said he would happily sell in bulk but refuses if "this is the only known copy, I'm going to cut it up."2
ISBNdb, a commercial book metadata service, was named in 404 Media reports as potentially supplying up to 1 million books per order to AI labs.
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However, no bookseller could confirm orders from ISBNdb, and the company has since scrubbed its website of AI training references, denying it ever bought, scanned, or sold books for this purpose.1
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Zoom Books says it resells books intact and only recycles what cannot be rehomed, but won't reveal whether it sells to AI firms, citing commercial confidentiality.2
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Legal Ruling Enables Widespread Adoption
In July, Judge William Alsup ruled that training AI on books constitutes fair use under copyright law because the practice is "transformative."
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The court found that destroying each printed copy during scanning meant "one replaced the other" rather than creating multiple copies, making it legally permissible.4
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The ruling noted there was "no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company."4
This legal precedent means destructive scanning is now both lawful and less regulated than strip mining in the United States, which has very few legal provisions governing the treatment or export of books as cultural heritage.
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Anthropic spokesperson told Tom's Guide that "sourcing books is a widely used approach for training large language models across the AI industry" and that the company buys "books from regular commercial markets" rather than rare or antiquarian titles.3
However, ethical concerns persist about cultural preservation when opacity prevents booksellers from screening buyers.2
Source: TechRadar
Industry Reactions and Future Implications
Michael Burry called the practice "evil incarnate," while Elon Musk responded on X by saying he asked engineers training xAI's models to "preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way."
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Critics note that unlike websites or modern publications, exceptionally scarce historical works that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling cannot be reproduced after physical copies disappear.5
The scale of destruction has been compared unfavorably to historical losses: "Such a level of destruction is an order of magnitude bigger than the loss of the Library of Alexandria. Yet, it is unfolding with none of the outrage that history reserves for burned libraries."
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With the court ruling establishing precedent and AI companies across the industry reportedly adopting similar practices, watch for increased tensions between the tech sector's hunger for clean training data and cultural preservation advocates demanding transparency in book sourcing.References
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