CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Project Panama: Scanning and Book Destruction at Anthropic

Photo by Brecht Corbeel

Book burning. Book pulping.  Book vandalising.  It’s all the fashion and, dare one say it, the rage.  Libraries are carting them off to the dump.  Repositories of memory are being shredded in favour of supposedly more useful digital formats.  And now, Anthropic’s hungering for books, not as sources of enlightened knowledge so much as blue raw data for their Language Learning Models, is there for all to see.  Acquire the books in question. Give service providers the task of severing their spines.  Employ scanners to process the information.  Dispatch the paper to be pulped and recycled (awfully good of them).  The result: a private research library able to nourish Claude, the company’s premier LLM.

Last month, an investigation by 404 Media took note of the purchasing habits of AI companies as regards old books – whatever that means – identifying ISBNdb as an instrumental broker in the field.  The company, according to its own description, “gathers data from various public sources like libraries and merchants to compile a vast collection of unique book data searchable by ISBN, title, author or publisher.”  At present, it boasts 111,978,817 searchable books and offers clients somewhere between 1,000 to 1 million books per engagement.  Older print publications are advertised as the purer sort, uncontaminated by presence of generative-AI.  “Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination,” states an article published by the company.  It remains unclear whether ISBNdb’s client list is crowded by those of the destructive scanning persuasion, though the company is not oblivious to the problem.

The same goes for other book sellers as to whether their activities are feeding the AI maw of physical pulverisation.  The Canadian company Zoom Books specialises in acquiring nonfiction and academic titles from the 1970s in bulk, storing........

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