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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6712 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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Anthropic is destroying old books to build AI.

This is an old story that has been picking up on twitter this week. Here's the Washington Post from January:

Inside an AI start-up’s plan to scan and dispose of millions of books

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot, Claude.

It turns out that destroying old books is one of the cheapest ways to build an AI dataset. Old books are well-structured texts and (generally) contain quality information; digital archives incur tremendous legal fees and liabilities; copyright risks, in fact, are unsettled and could threaten the entire AI buildout. There's no such problem with maintaining a private library of books: the problem is how to scan them. Physical books have an awkward, blocky shape if your goal is to lay them flat on a reader and extract all the text. The simplest solution is to rip the spine out, lay the pages flat, and run them through a scanner:

The document describes how the scanning company’s “hydraulic powered cutting machine” would “neatly cut” books, whose pages would later be “scanned on high speed, high quality, production level scanners.” Finally, it notes, the scanning company will “schedule with the recycling company to pick up the completed books.”

"Completed books" is such an interesting euphemism, isn't it? You cut the books "neatly," let's not elaborate on that too much, scan them on "high speed, high quality" scanners, narrative detail, narrative detail, then you "schedule with the recycling company". For "the completed books". It's kind of gorgeous.

Ars Technica goes into other details in their article from June 2025, here:

Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models

The 32-page legal decision tells the story of how, in February 2024, the company hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for the Google Books book-scanning project, and tasked him with obtaining “all the books in the world.” The strategic hire appears to have been designed to replicate Google’s legally successful book digitization approach—the same scanning operation that survived copyright challenges and established key fair use precedents.

So Anthropic is really just copying what Google did before, except that Google didn't have to "schedule" the "completed books":

While destructive scanning is a common practice among some book digitizing operations, Anthropic’s approach was somewhat unusual due to its documented massive scale. By contrast, the Google Books project largely used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan millions of books borrowed from libraries and later returned. For Anthropic, the faster speed and lower cost of the destructive process appears to have trumped any need for preserving the physical books themselves, hinting at the need for a cheap and easy solution in a highly competitive industry.

But it was a good deal for Anthropic nonetheless. Destroying books saved them from billions in copyright disputes:

Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to “conserv[ing] space” through format conversion and found it transformative. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company’s earlier piracy undermined its position.

Before continuing, I would like to introduce here one other critical detail I will come back to later:

The court documents don’t indicate that any rare books were destroyed in this process—Anthropic purchased its books in bulk from major retailers—but archivists long ago established other ways to extract information from paper. For example, The Internet Archive pioneered non-destructive book scanning methods that preserve physical volumes while creating digital copies. And earlier this month, OpenAI and Microsoft announced they’re working with Harvard’s libraries to train AI models on nearly 1 million public domain books dating back to the 15th century—fully digitized but preserved to live another day.

So even though Anthropic didn't have to destroy their books, at least they apparently haven't destroyed anything truly rare.

This old story has been all over my twitter this week with a spate of discussion. Maybe this is a clever marketing ploy by Big Elon, because when I went searching for a recent article to corroborate this post I found this PR puff piece from today:

Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will preserve rare books instead of destroying them for AI training

Elon Musk has taken a pointed swipe at Anthropic’s controversial book-scanning methods, saying SpaceXAI will preserve rare volumes rather than damage them while preparing training material for artificial intelligence systems. His comments arrive as questions deepen over how AI companies acquire, digitise and use books to build increasingly powerful models.

There you have it: Anthropic destroyed millions of books, one of the greatest evils we can imagine, to save a few bucks. And now that the public has been informed the great AI companies are going to behave much more responsibly and treasure our collective heritage. Happy, happy!

I would now like to argue that Anthropic was right.

I know that this strikes many as a priori evil. Destroying books for many evokes (or is even the same as) book-burning. And many consider destroying books to be one of the greatest evils imaginable.

So I would like to start by asserting that, before Anthropic destroyed these books, they were basically worthless.

I think people are living in a fantasy. These unread books are not sitting in a warehouse vault somewhere, pristine, untouched, waiting for their future destiny forever home. A wise scholar is not going to stumble across these books in a stony brook and find exactly the wisdom he was seeking. Your future wife is not a perfect passive virgin waiting for you to find her, however long that takes. No, it doesn't work like that. These books are constantly decaying. Everything is constantly decaying. Everything is constantly being destroyed.

By destroying books Anthropic put them to a better use. Destruction is, in fact, the only way anything is ever created.

The Odyssey is current now because of Nolan's latest film. The Odyssey is a beautiful poem that reached us across thousands of years of preservation. One imagines Orthodox monks painstakingly copying everything by hand, vellum and inkwells, Gregorian chants and prayers. It's beautiful. But the less-remembered half is that there were other poems in the Epic Cycle besides The Odyssey (and The Iliad) that did not make it to us. Another six poems are lost. Why? Because readers found them boring. They were not, apparently, beautiful. At least, nobody found them important enough to dedicate their life to saving them. They were never burned or actively destroyed. They just decayed and, though disuse, were lost.

That is the only way anything is ever saved. Art is either alive and part of a vital culture, or it is dead and decays. "Anything not saved will be lost."

And it is necessary to destroy in order to create. The world is choked up with lots of preserved junk. Museums are full of it. Forests burn when you let it pile up too high. Cultures stagnate when too many idols become sacred cows. And it is very easy to make it difficult to build. Every "historic neighborhood" designation and preserved building makes it more difficult to build new homes. Every regulation is an assertion that we would rather curtail some forms of life, that not everything is equal.

I love going to local rinky-dink museums, it's a guilty pleasure of mine, and you know what I invariably find when I go? Old books, lots of them, sitting behind glass shelves where no one is allowed to read them. It's a minor industry. You can go to Mount Vernon or Monticello or the Henry Ford house and everywhere you'll find old dirty books just sitting there. There are companies you can place orders to if you want to open your own old house museum. Books sit there rotting, decor, not used by anyone, nobody minds.

The balance, I think, is that the new has to justify itself as better than the old. It was wrong to destroy old Penn Station in New York, because what replaced it was far less beautiful. It was wrong to let Cleveland and Detroit rot and some of the most beautiful house neighborhoods in America go to grass. I think it was wrong to destroy all the Confederate Statues, because nobody erected a better set of heroes. I remember when ISIS rampaged through Syria and they destroyed the Assyrian Lions. For what, nothing beautiful, and for what.

But I don't think destruction is inherently bad. I think New York is beautiful, London is beautiful, the built environments surpass the natural landscape that preceded them. And I consider what Anthropic is doing to be inherently more worthwhile than a few million burned books, especially if they didn't even destroy anything rare.

There is a load-bearing thought I have been trying to get at that came to me from Loren Eiseley through John Donne -- I believe, forgive me, the reference is not in front of me as I write. It goes like this: "Nature is not all that natural." The world is not in a wild state of nature. I believe in Genesis, I think everything is like a garden, there is no default state of nature that precedes our intervention. Yellowstone is beautiful, it's "natural," but it's made more beautiful because we maintain it. We assert that Yellowstone is more beautiful than the oil pipelines we could build there instead. Tomatoes are beautiful to me, I assert the right to pluck weeds out of the garden, not everything is equal. I eat meat, I think my life is worth more than a cow's, however beautiful a heifer may be. I don't take this destruction casually either, I don't mean this to be glib, I think I have a responsibility to life up to the value of what has been destroyed to give me life. How could it be otherwise? I think any other answer is self-abnegation, the first step toward a kind of selfish selflessness that leads to a suicidal bend.

My argument is that it's right for Anthropic to burn books because they are creating something higher than what they've destroyed. This argument is not reciprocal. It would be wrong if what Anthropic was creating was worse. I think this is just what it means to be alive. This is Genesis, this is the Parable of the Talents, this is the basis of civilization.

Destroying books is generally fine because physical media is obsolete. If they're special books, keep them, otherwise if you really want to preserve them, M-DISC will last longer and is more compact.

But the data shouldn't be destroyed. Storage is cheap, and even nearly useless data isn't completely useless, evidenced by AI training. Nor should Anthropic be the only ones with access to it, there may be other uses.

The authors of these books are long dead, that they're still under copyright is a testament to how flawed our legal system is.

physical media is obsolete

Not remotely. Physical media is the only way to ensure you actually own something. We've seen that even digital "purchases" can be revoked from your account because the media cartel says you don't get to have that any more. But they can't (yet, I guess) remotely destroy your DVDs, paper books, and so on.

Also, when it comes to books specifically, paper is still far and away the best reading experience you can have. Easy on the eyes, requires no tech, and they have a pleasant tactile nature which no ebook reader will ever be able to match.

Revocable digital purchases are a separate problem, you can own something digitally by obtaining the raw text (or Markdown or a simple PDF).

physical media is obsolete

I beg to differ. Books are one of the best medium for storing texts long term because unlike disks and tape, they are driverless and shelf stable. M-DISC is all well and good but the day that there is no longer an incentive to make and/or fix mechanical disk drives, you are SOL. Books only need to be stored properly and you can always recover them with the Mk1 Eyeball.

I agree with the sentiment, but for what it's worth, most modern books don't have this kind of longevity. If you go to a bookstore today, everything you see inside is going to be printed on cheap paper that will decay and become unreadable after a couple of hundred years. Mostly we don't care about this because we have no aspirations of these books lasting that long.

If you go to a museum or academic library and ask the curators about some of their really old books, the ones that have survived are on more resilient media. The Book of Kells is still readable today, in part because vellum is significantly more durable than paper. But this is true of paper as well. If you find, say, a Geneva Bible from the 16th century, those were printed on thicker paper than most mass market books today, and thus have survived in a readable state even with heavy use.

It's the acid content of books from the 19th and 20th century that make them degrade so fast, moreso than the thickness (though the flimsiness of the pages doesn't help).

I'll be honest - I am repeating what I was told by a library curator years ago. I remember that modern books will decay relatively rapidly, while many older books are more resilient, but I do not remember the scientific explanation.

So thank you for the correction! I appreciate it.

It might also be so that there is no longer an incentive to learn extinct languages such as 2026 English.

My intuition tells me it's easier to lapse in maintaining climate in a warehouse than lose disk reader technology.

There are still people who keep old English learnable(indeed, you can get some pretty good online courses)- and unlike Latin, Greek(Greek programs would barely exist anymore if it wasn’t for evangelicals buying ‘New Testament Greek’ lessons to cover expenses), or Hebrew, this isn’t due to religious necessity.

Do most people learn Latin and Greek for ecclesiastic purposes? Seems more of a classicist thing (Princeton's efforts notwithstanding).

The majority of Ancient Greek learners are religious Christians, although in a classroom setting it’s much more split. If you search for Greek lessons the majority of it will be ‘read thé New Testament’. Latin is significantly more driven by academic needs(and there are academic disciplines in which Latin is indispensable), but this is often subsidized by seminaries.

With all due respect to your instinct, how is it easier to maintain access to complex semiconductors and high precision motors than maintain a room dry and free of sunlight on a centuries long timeframe?

Bitrot is a thing, though. One of the cool technologies MS is working on is glass storage technology.

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