Anthropic linked to physical book destruction for AI training

Reports have emerged regarding the physical destruction of millions of books to facilitate artificial intelligence training. Following a legal dispute between authors and Anthropic, the creator of Claude, details have surfaced concerning ‘Project Panama’. This initiative reportedly aims to create a digital library containing ‘all the books in the world’.

According to internal documents and reports, the process involves purchasing massive quantities of used, rare, and specialized books—including technical manuals and scientific monographs—only to strip them of their bindings, scan them rapidly, and then recycle the physical copies. This practice was highlighted by the Wall Street Journal, noting that rare books are being bought in bulk only to be ‘cut into pieces and fed to AI’.

Critics argue that this method of data acquisition threatens cultural memory and physical archives, especially since the books are being destroyed rather than simply scanned digitally.