Artificial Intelligence

AI Companies Are Destroying Books. That's Not Nearly as Scary as It Sounds.

Destructively scanning books is making information more accessible to the masses.

Jack Nicastro | 8.28.2026 12:32 PM

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Photo: Yobro10//Valpal/Jiri Hera/Thomas Perkins/Dreamstime. Illustration: FatimaRuiz/ Midjourney.)

Are AI companies acquiring books, scanning them for training data, and destroying the physical copies? Yes, but the reality is much less dire than popular coverage suggests. 

Last week, the Demand Progress Education Fund sent a coalition letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the agency to investigate whether such bulk book digitization, "including [of] rare, out-of-print titles with few surviving copies," is anticompetitive behavior that illegally protects AI companies from competition. The focal point of the letter is Project Panama, Anthropic's self-described "effort to destructively scan all the books in the world." 

A destructive scan, one in which a physical book is destroyed in the process of being digitized, sounds sinister, but this method is a highly efficient way to convert books from bits to bytes. It also helps ensure compliance with copyright law. As federal Judge William Alsup found in Bartz v. Anthropic (2025), destructive scanning to........

© Reason.com