AI companies are buying, scanning, then destroying physical books—Anna's Archive calls for volunteers to scan rare books now

AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

A volunteer post on Anna's Archive claims Anthropic's 'Project Panama' spent tens of millions of dollars buying millions of paper books, scanning them to train Claude, then destroying the physical copies. The reasons: block competitors from the same data, reduce legal exposure, and because destroying is cheaper than lossless scanning. The result is that only the company holds the digital copies on private servers. The post urges volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books—especially rare ones—before more are destroyed. The article does not name other companies doing this, nor does it list specific titles or quantities already destroyed.

Why it matters: Anthropic exposed for destroying physical books as training data, with dollar figures and operational details — substantive and discussion-worthy. Score capped because the source is a volunteer guest post on Anna's Archive, not an original investigation, and no specific destro...