AI is eating the world’s books
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How did a rare‑bookseller first notice suspicious bulk orders for old titles?
That's the sound of a book being scanned to train AI. This one remains intact. Others face a more brutal fate.
Cut the spine off it, rip the pages out, scan them. Throw it away.
Nobody knows how many rare old books have now been bought and destroyed to feed the AI beast, but secondhand booksellers around the world have reported anonymous orders ranging from a thousand to a million books at a time. And internal documents from AI giant Anthropic have revealed plans to, quote, destructively scan all the books in the world. I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to Seven AM. Today, author Sarah Wilson on the destruction of knowledge to make artificial intelligence. It's Monday, september twenty eighth. But Sarah, I thought we could begin with this bookseller who became suspicious about who was actually putting in orders for the rare books they owned and ultimately managed to find out quite a lot about what was going on.
Tell me about what happened.
Yeah, so there's this kind of network of rare booksellers and they'd been getting uh these large orders for rare and unusual books, but specifically ones that were older or were published pre-2022. One particular bookseller teamed up with a media organization, an independent media organization called four oh four media. I
had set up the air tag so it was it was linked to my phone and I could see where it was going. Uh and they put an air tag in one of the books and tracked this book all across the US. But it left California from an airport. Uh next up it appeared in an airport in Wisconsin. It was in a warehouse near the airport.
Until it finally arrived at an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas or the Nevada Desert. And this particular warehouse has a logo, and it's a picture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex attacking a book. And what they were able to find is that Amazon workers had been sharing information about what was going on in this particular warehouse.
What is Anthropic’s “Project Panama” and how did it plan to scan books?
They'd been charged with removing the spine. Of each one of these books so that the pages could be easily photocopied, scanned, and then digitally uploaded. And the allegation is that these pages were being used to feed the LLMs, the large language models for Amazon.
And we've since learned that this isn't isolated to one bookseller, a few booksellers, or even one tech company. It turns out that Anthropic has had this secret plan as well to buy and then destroy large amounts of books. So tell me about that project that they were calling Project Panama.
Yeah, once again it's secretive. It was only discovered through court filings for another court case, a related court case that Anthropic was going through for piracy. And so there were a bunch of authors who did a class action seeking compensation for piracy. And in the process of that court case, it was revealed that they were also engaged in this what's called destructive scanning.
It's the largest copyright settlement in American history. The AI company Anthropic forced to pay out a whopping one point five billion dollars after a judge said it illegally pirated more than seven million digitized books to train its AI model.
And the court documents that were revealed actually found that the aim was to destructively scan all books in the world for this particular project. But once again, Ruby, we only found out about it by accident via another court case with a bunch of authors, which by the way, I was implicated in. I am one of the authors in this class action against anthropics. So this now seems to be a widespread way to be able to f scan books without actually having to pay authors copyright. It's far cheaper to buy a copy of a book, get it shipped to some big warehouse somewhere, and scan and destroy them.
And so why destroy them though? So the books they're being used to train AI models, but why then go ahead and get rid of them afterwards? Well, it's simply
Easier for them? That's the real answer.
Why do AI companies cut spines and destroy books after scanning them?
So there is some speculation that in this court case with Anthropic, that the fact that they destroyed them and then replaced them with a digital copy lended things to a fair use defense.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did a rare‑bookseller first notice suspicious bulk orders for old titles?
0:06–2:26
2
What is Anthropic’s “Project Panama” and how did it plan to scan books?
2:26–4:42
3
Why do AI companies cut spines and destroy books after scanning them?
4:42–6:39
4
Why are only pre‑2022 books being targeted for destructive scanning?
6:39–8:59
5
What happened in the $1.5 billion Anthropic copyright settlement?
8:59–10:38
6
Why did author Sarah Wilson agree to a licensing deal with Microsoft?
10:38–12:25
7
What will AI companies do when they run out of older books to train on?
12:25–14:08
8
How are writers, philosophers and legislators responding to book‑scanning abuse?
14:08–16:39
Speakers
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