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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6528 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.

I'm someone who loves physical books. Indeed, I collect them, to my wife's perpetual disapproval; I've got multiple Arion and Grabhorn and Centipede books, sometimes running into four figures per. Particularly relevant to Anthropic, a pride and joy of mine is an original edition of Rosenblatt's Principles of Neurodynamics, in fine condition with a fine dust jacket (it's difficult to find in any condition).

This is all just faux outrage. The vast majority of these books are ex-lib, non-unique, decaying physical copies of books that no one actually cares about anyway. The booksellers who Anthropic is purchasing them from would send them to the dump eventually. Anthropic isn't shredding the Gutenberg Bible, or anything even a couple steps in principle removed from it.

My only real moral complaint is that Anthropic should be uploading them post-processing to Anna's Archive, though it's understandable why they didn't.

It was bad that they were sending them to the dump, too. It doesn't become less bad just because most people wouldn't think of it until now.

We have the storage. Billions of pulp novels must be uploaded. They were worth printing once, they are certainly worth archiving.

Storage here would mean a massive, climate controlled, disaster resilient library-warehouse, requiring a team of specialists. You can't just pile the books up in a bunch of cardboard boxes; every year you'd have X% decay into oblivion. It would also be closed off to the public.

There's a reason no one does this: no one cares, given the costs involved. I'm sure Anthropic would have been happy to just ship them to someone else for preservation, but who would take them?

I don't mean store the dead trees. I mean store the data, in free public access.

That's forbidden by copyright law.

The advent of generative AI in 2022 has resulted in a lot of talk about copyright, and if Anthropic decided to unilaterally declare copyright as a concept that's become obsoleted by gen AI and which belongs in the dustbin of history like slavery and lobotomy, that would certainly make the ongoing AI-related culture wars that much more interesting. Now I kinda want to see that happen.

Information should be free! except for distilling.

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