AI companies accused of destroying rare books through destructive scanning

Independent booksellers across Europe and Australia are raising alarms over a pattern of massive, unusual orders for obscure and rare books. Experts suspect these acquisitions are part of a trend where artificial intelligence companies purchase physical volumes to facilitate rapid digitization for training large language models.

Reports indicate that some companies utilize a method known as ‘destructive scanning.’ This process involves cutting the spines of books to allow high-speed industrial scanners to process loose pages, effectively destroying the physical integrity of the volumes. A leaked document from a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic referred to such efforts as ‘Project Panama,’ described as an attempt to ‘destructively scan all the books in the world.’

While Anthropic has stated that its Claude chatbot is trained on publicly available web data and commercially acquired datasets, and has denied specifically targeting rare or antiquarian books, the practice has caused significant concern. Booksellers in Ireland, Germany, and Italy have reported receiving large, non-negotiated orders for eclectic or low-value titles, suggesting an automated or high-volume procurement strategy aimed at feeding AI training pipelines.