Anthropic Destroyed Millions of Books. Here’s Why.

Anthropic bought millions of physical books, cut off their bindings, scanned every page and discarded the paper originals.

In this video I explain Project Panama, why old books are valuable AI training data, why the court accepted Anthropic's purchased-copy conversion as fair use, and why its separate pirated-book library led to a $1.5 billion settlement. This was not a verified campaign against priceless first editions, but the private digital library still raises serious questions about access, provenance and preservation.

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Sources:

Bartz v. Anthropic fair-use order

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.434709/gov.uscourts.cand.434709.231.0_4.pdf

Associated Press: Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement

https://apnews.com/article/74b140444023898aeba8579b6e9f0d63

404 Media: Why AI companies are buying old books

https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/

The Washington Post: Project Panama

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/

NL Times: Rare-book dealers' concerns

https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-firms-destroying-obscure-editions-train-ai-models