Buy, Scan, Destroy: AI Firms Are Shredding Millions of Books to Train Their Chatbots
Unsealed filings show the firms bought, cut apart and scanned millions of books, with Anthropic later agreeing to pay $1.5 billion in a settlement.
- Anthropic initiated a secret project called "Project Panama" to "destructively scan all the books in the world," creating training data for its Claude AI models by cutting, scanning, and recycling physical books.
- To lead the effort, Anthropic hired former Google executive Tom Turvey, who helped create Google Books more than two decades ago, as the company viewed books as critical for teaching models "how to write well."
- A proposal from a scanning vendor outlined plans to digitize between 500,000 and 2 million books in six months, using industrial cutting machines to remove bindings before scanning pages for data.
- Anthropic later agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle claims, while a judge ruled that using books to train AI models could qualify as "transformative," though acquisition methods remain actionable.
- The AI industry's race for high-quality data fuels an escalating copyright battle, with Google, Meta, and OpenAI also facing litigation regarding their training practices, leaving broader legal boundaries currently unresolved.
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Artificial intelligence companies are buying up used and rare books en masse, cutting them up, digitizing them to train models, and then destroying them. Experts warn that rare editions and last copies of rare works are also being destroyed.
Tech giants ship tons of books from German trade to the USA and cut them there. A legal trick makes physical destruction more attractive than digital licenses. Can we do something about it?
AI companies are destroying rare books
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AI Is the New Book Burning
Just when we thought tech companies couldn’t get more odious, they took a page from the long, tyrannical tradition of book burning. Author and bibliophile Ed Simon opines today about the horrific revelation that Anthropic scanned and then shredded out-of-print books to train its large language models, a shameless act of artistic plunder aimed at gutting our humanity. Read and share, and take this as a sign to support your local library while you…
Why AI companies are cutting up books to train AI models
For years, frontier AI companies have relied heavily on text scraped from the public internet. With the proliferation of AI-generated content and copyright disputes, companies have begun looking elsewhere for reliable, human-written material.
Artificial intelligence companies (AIs) have been scanning and then destroying books to feed their models. The post Why AI is implementing the "destructive scan" of books and they didn't want us to know about it appeared first on BioBioChile.
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