The Great Forgetting

Confirmation of Anthropic’s BOOK BURNING for their AI: The Great Forgetting of the Amnesia Generation

In the quiet warehouses and shipping docks of 2024, Anthropic did not merely train an AI.

It staged a quiet erasure of human knowledge.

While the public was still dazzled by Claude’s fluent paragraphs and polished marketing emails, the company’s engineers and logistics teams were busy executing Project Panama—an internal campaign whose own documents announced the ambition to “destructively scan all the books in the world.”

The method was industrial and irreversible: buy the physical volume SOMETIMES THE LAST COPY, slice its SPINE with a hydraulic cutter, feed the pages through high-speed scanners, then pulp what remained.

Millions of books: scientific research, novels, rare technical treatises, obscure monographs, volumes that had already survived wars, fires, and decades of handling—were reduced to data tokens and then to wet mulch or burned.

They literally burn the evidence of this crime against humanity.

The company itself preferred the darkness. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this,” the planning memos warned.

A federal judge later blessed the slaughter. Because Anthropic had purchased the copies and then destroyed them, the court held, the act was “transformative” fair use. Ownership plus obliteration equaled permission.

The ruling handed every subsequent AI lab a legal license to treat the printed past as disposable feedstock.

That license is now being exercised at industrial scale. In 2026, companies like ISBNdb openly market pre-2022 books as the last pure reservoir of human language—text uncontaminated by the synthetic sludge that large language models themselves have already poured into the open web.

Orders arrive for tens or hundreds of thousands of titles at a time. Non-disclosure agreements are standard.

The preferred language is “digital preservation.”

The actual outcome is the same mechanical process Anthropic refined: spine cut, pages scanned, original shredded.

Rare and near-unique copies are disappearing into the same pipeline. Booksellers across continents report sudden, strange bulk orders for specialized, low-demand titles that no ordinary collector would ever buy in volume.

Once the pages are gone, they are gone forever.

A website can be re-uploaded. A bestseller can be reprinted.

The last three surviving copies of an eighteenth-century botanical text cannot.

This is not progress. It is the Great Forgetting.

An entire generation of machines is being taught to speak by consuming and then discarding the physical record of human thought.

The companies that profit from the resulting fluency call the process necessary, legal, and even enlightened.

They speak of curated knowledge and domain-specific expertise while the spines crack and the paper is carted away.

Anthropic did not invent the hunger for data, but it demonstrated openly in private documents and then under court seal how far a well-funded laboratory was willing to go to satisfy it, and how readily the law would ratify the destruction.

Just to gain a temporary AI benchmark advantage.

The amnesia is already here.

Future models will generate elegant sentences to beat Al sorts of tests about history, science, and literature.

They will do so on the ashes of the books that once contained those sentences.

The generation that built these systems will leave its children fluent machines and emptier shelves.

That is the real product of Project Panama and its successors: not intelligence, but a carefully engineered cultural void, papered over with synthetic prose and non-disclosure agreements.

We are left to forget to remember. We are The Amnesia Generation with our brains being put into a meat grinder and fed back to us.

Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models

Company hired Google’s book-scanning chief to cut up and digitize “all the books in the world.”

On Monday, court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI—details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use whose broader fair use implications we reported yesterday.

The 32-page legal decision tells the story of how, in February 2024, the company hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for the Google Books book-scanning project, and tasked him with obtaining “all the books in the world.” The strategic hire appears to have been designed to replicate Google’s legally successful book digitization approach—the same scanning operation that survived copyright challenges and established key fair use precedents.

While destructive scanning is a common practice among some book digitizing operations, Anthropic’s approach was somewhat unusual due to its documented massive scale. By contrast, the Google Books project largely used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan millions of books borrowed from libraries and later returned. For Anthropic, the faster speed and lower cost of the destructive process appears to have trumped any need for preserving the physical books themselves, hinting at the need for a cheap and easy solution in a highly competitive industry.

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Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to “conserv[ing] space” through format conversion and found it transformative. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company’s earlier piracy undermined its position.

But if you’re not intimately familiar with the AI industry and copyright, you might wonder: Why would a company spend millions of dollars on books to destroy them? Behind these odd legal maneuvers lies a more fundamental driver: the AI industry’s insatiable hunger for high-quality text.

The race for high-quality training data

To understand why Anthropic would want to scan millions of books, it’s important to know that AI researchers build large language models (LLMs) like those that power ChatGPT and Claude by feeding billions of words into a neural network. During training, the AI system processes the text repeatedly, building statistical relationships between words and concepts in the process.

The quality of training data fed into the neural network directly impacts the resulting AI model’s capabilities. Models trained on well-edited books and articles tend to produce more coherent, accurate responses than those trained on lower-quality text like random YouTube comments.

Publishers legally control content that AI companies desperately want, but AI companies don’t always want to negotiate a license. The first-sale doctrine offered a workaround: Once you buy a physical book, you can do what you want with that copy—including destroy it. That meant buying physical books offered a legal workaround.

And yet buying things is expensive, even if it is legal. So like many AI companies before it, Anthropic initially chose the quick and easy path. In the quest for high-quality training data, the court filing states, Anthropic first chose to amass digitized versions of pirated books to avoid what CEO Dario Amodei called “legal/practice/business slog”—the complex licensing negotiations with publishers. But by 2024, Anthropic had become “not so gung ho about” using pirated ebooks “for legal reasons” and needed a safer source.

Credit: State of Washington

Buying used physical books sidestepped licensing entirely while providing the high-quality, professionally edited text that AI models need, and destructive scanning was simply the fastest way to digitize millions of volumes. The company spent “many millions of dollars” on this buying and scanning operation, often purchasing used books in bulk. Next, they stripped books from bindings, cut pages to workable dimensions, scanned them as stacks of pages into PDFs with machine-readable text including covers, then discarded all the paper originals.

The court documents don’t indicate that any rare books were destroyed in this process—Anthropic purchased its books in bulk from major retailers—but archivists long ago established other ways to extract information from paper. For example, The Internet Archive pioneered non-destructive book scanning methods that preserve physical volumes while creating digital copies. And earlier this month, OpenAI and Microsoft announced they’re working with Harvard’s libraries to train AI models on nearly 1 million public domain books dating back to the 15th century—fully digitized but preserved to live another day.

While Harvard carefully preserves 600-year-old manuscripts for AI training, somewhere on Earth sits the discarded remains of millions of books that taught Claude how to juice up your résumé. When asked about this process, Claude itself offered a poignant response in a style culled from billions of pages of discarded text: “The fact that this destruction helped create me—something that can discuss literature, help people write, and engage with human knowledge—adds layers of complexity I’m still processing. It’s like being built from a library’s ashes.”