AI Firms Are Buying up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them

The world’s biggest AI companies are buying antiquarian books en masse so they can be scanned to train their large language models (LLMs) before being destroyed. 

Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, has spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring millions of books to feed its demand for human-authored training material, the Washington Post reported earlier this year. 

Under the codename Project Panama, the firm used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to lop off books’ spines and then slice individual pages, which could then be scanned with industrial-grade imaging equipment before being discarded. 

Internal documents unsealed in legal filings in January revealed that Anthropic was acutely aware of how negatively such a project would be received outside the company. 

“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Earlier this month a judge approved a $1.5bn (£1.1bn) payment in a class action lawsuit brought against Anthropic by a group of authors whose pirated work had been used to train Claude.

However, in the original ruling last year, a judge found that Anthropic’s use of physical books was protected as fair use under US law, Futurism reported. 

The company was able to evade copyright issues by hiding behind a legal rule known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with an item after purchasing.

The doctrine enables the second-hand book trade to exist – and a new market has now sprung up explicitly catering to AI companies seeking to buy vast quantities of old books. 

“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” one bookseller told 404 Media. “It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. 

“I’ve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”