A guest essay on Anna’s Archive’s blog claims AI companies are buying up millions of secondhand books, scanning them for training data, and then destroying the physical copies.
- Anthropic’s “Project Panama,” exposed during its $1.5 billion copyright settlement, reportedly spent tens of millions of dollars buying and scanning millions of paper books to train Claude — then destroyed them all.
- The essay’s reasons for the destruction: keep competitors from scanning the same books, reduce legal risk, and avoid the cost of careful, lossless scanning.
- Net effect, per the author: knowledge gets permanently locked inside private corporate servers, which sits awkwardly with AI’s promise to make human knowledge accessible.
The post is also a call to action: Anna’s Archive is recruiting volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books from libraries and archives — with recognition, lifetime membership, or paid scanning fees for large efforts — before the books are gone.
The time pressure, as they frame it: AI-generated content now makes up more than half of newly published internet content, and once AI absorbs the last human-written sentences, the internet’s future text is mostly AI talking to itself. Whether or not you buy the framing, the underlying fact — that physical copies of rare books are a one-time resource — is hard to argue with.