AI companies like Anthropic are buying and destroying millions of books — many of them rare, first-edition copies or hard-to-find, out-of-print editions — to feed chatbots, the Washington Post reported earlier this year.
Some booksellers say they went from selling about 20 books… pic.twitter.com/PpKevAX55Q
— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) July 30, 2026
The world’s biggest AI companies are buying antique 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.
“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.”
AI companies are anonymously buying and destroying millions of books through middleman services https://t.co/qJPc3TFWZt
— PC Gamer (@pcgamer) July 28, 2026
There are books going into these shredders that exist nowhere else on Earth. Booksellers are watching last-surviving copies get bulk-ordered by anonymous buyers, spine-sliced by hydraulic machines, and pulped.
And here’s the part that should make your skin crawl. The destruction… https://t.co/FvOlTxcTM7
— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) July 30, 2026
