AI Companies Bulk-Buy and Destroy Physical Books to Scan for Training Data
emax · x · 2026-07-30
Faced with massive copyright lawsuits, major AI companies like Anthropic have exploited a legal loophole: bulk-buying physical books, shearing off their spines for high-speed scanning to extract training data, and then discarding the originals.
Known as "destructive scanning," the practice uses hydraulic machines to slice the spines off used and sometimes rare books. Anthropic's internal initiative, "Project Panama," reportedly aimed to destructively scan up to two million books.
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