Anthropic’s “Project Panama” involved buying millions of physical books in bulk, destructively scanning them (cutting spines, digitising pages), and then pulping the originals to create a private research library for training Claude.

The company preferred pre-LLM print books as “uncontaminated” data and also used large quantities of pirated digital books, later settling a copyright case for $1.5 billion over the pirated material.

While a US court ruled the transformative use of legitimately purchased books for AI training was fair use, the physical destruction of books and reliance on pirated copies highlight a broader, troubling trend of treating printed knowledge as disposable raw material for AI.

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........

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