As for the story: they make it sound like AI companies are buying up all existing copies of rare books and stealing the knowledge, which isn’t the case, as far as I know.
Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest.
edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than one copy.
I support Anna's Archive, by the way. Information wants to be free.
Is the corpus of human knowledge useful for high quality AI training now essentially frozen in time? Also, how useful old books really are for AI training besides helping AI acquire knowledge about history?
Copyright law requires you destroy a book, if you format shift it. If you digitise, you need to ensure its not a "copy" but that your one license went with the book.
So... If enough people complain, they get to pressure for copyright changes. Which will just so happen to have massive carveouts to let them do whatever they want.
So with this one copy BS are you not allowed to have backups of the data?
-- Thos. Jefferson
Deeper thought however, eventually this will all be lost to time and I suspect that about 99% of all printed materials probably would never be read again simply due to the huge volume of it and sheer obscurity. Ernest Becker and his work 'The Denial of Death' might have some thoughts on this.
go to any second hand book store and just pick out something at random from the 1950's for instance, something about pottery or bird watching or whatever. The history of Bisbee Arizona, I don't know. Look up the author, see if they even left a trace of their work and the vast majority of the time they have already been forgotten to the great void of the universe. In the end, it all goes away. Clinging only creates pain.
I'm not saying that we should let them just do this, I am just saying that long term it is a tough battle to fight only to lose the war.
It is not natural in the industry to preserve books! It's tricky to even give most books away. Our library has big donation boxes, and my understanding is: most of those books are destroyed.
The copyright thing I get, sort of (I mean, it's galling, because it's such a total special pleading argument from a cohort of people who otherwise have absolute contempt for copyright on anything other than code). The model trainers are getting away with something other people haven't gotten away with. OK, sure.
But this seems like the AI water use story, where the reality is that existing industries do whatever the bad thing is at scales cosmically larger than AI ever could, and we're zeroing in on this weird little slice of it that AI does. Like, let me know when we stop growing pecans in the California desert, and then we can talk?
Are you expecting the authors/publishers to send digital copies to AI companies directly? Or expecting AI companies to preserve the physical copies indefinitely? Both are not gonna happen, copyrighted or not.
These are not going to be the kinds of books "The Ninth Gate" resolved around - truly one of a kind. It's not good they are destroying books, but they are books which do have other copies. Just perhaps not many.
I have no evidence but I can't help suspecting in part the publicity around this is driven in part by rights holders that want to force AI companies back to e-books where they can force them into licensing deals.
> People keep pointing out, and it doesn't seem to sink in, that model trainers only have use for a single copy of a book.
Please pardon the tangent: that's what always bothered me about the Borg in Star Trek. Why do they need to assimilate whole species? I'm sure there are enough volunteers in the federation that would join the Borg collective. Even a handful should be enough.
Furthermore, they like that AI is bad. Because they think it's bad, and being right feels good.
No. They also use lots of other methods to get training data.
The legal ruling from Judge William Alsup declared that if AI companies purchased the books legally and then copied them to their servers, it was fair use as a "transformative" operation, but the originals had to be destroyed in that case, because then there was only one copy still in existence (the one on Anthropic's servers):
From https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/05/anthro...
> Under US copyright law, the “fair use” doctrine allows you to make “transformative” use of copyrighted works without the owner’s permission. Anthropic took printed books and scanned them, “transforming” or remediating them into a new, electronic format. They then disposed of the original printed copy: the “destructive” part of destructive scanning. Along the way, Anthropic’s vendors had already sliced the spines and edges of the books, to scan them more easily before destroying them. “One replaced the other,” as Judge William Alsup wrote, noting: “There is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company.”
If you think there is priceless knowledge locked up in books so rare that it is on the verge of being lost forever, then AI labs are not really the problem!
It's that simple, these corps have once again broken the social contract, you must not reward them. OpenAI and Anthropic especially, both owned by schizo sociopathic elites. Just use Chinese open models on 3rd party providers or more ethical companies.
This is literally the only power you have outside of Luigi, you're not going to fix anything with a letter writing campaign. We are entering a fight for survival so you really need to step up your game and stop letting elites run over you.
Today it's just books and manipulating society, tomorrow they will track and punish your behaviour and the control will only get worse. These people are pure fucking evil and we need to start acting like it while we literally still have the freedom and privacy to organise.
No its not.
>but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.
Its only a crime if they dont also upload the scans to the internet.
>After AI companies massively scan and destroy physical books, they become the only ones in the world with digital copies. Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers.
This Law on the other hand is a crime against humanity.
>Anna’s Archive needs a plan to combat the destruction of physical books by AI companies.
No it doesnt.
>If every person scans a book, and there are 10 million volunteers worldwide, we can obtain 10 million pieces of invaluable wealth.
This however is an unvarnished good.
Look, piracy is the only realistic media archive we have.
We should be inviting, and working to eliminate opposition to, AI companies to assist in piracy.
This US v Them mentality is weird. If Anthropic has 10 million books scanned, get a copy. Thank them for the copy. Spread the copy.
So the solution is:
- mandatory copyright registration and renewal with links to where the work can be acquired
- a blanket carve out for any non-commercial trust-style org so that they can scan books etc and keep the data on their servers. They should be able to issue digital membership cards for a fee so that patrons can access the archives. Any work that is "live" based on the registration database will be locked. All "dead" material can be shared with members.
In this way, a hundred digital preservation societies can bloom.
On one side, there’s copyright law, which exists to support the work of creative people. “Information wants to be free” is bullshit spread by people who have never spent a minute in their lives trying to create something themselves. Artists need some form of reward.
On the other side, buying and destroying copies of rare books is quite scary. We would lose access to those books if they weren’t digitized. They are creating walls around knowledge that they acquired because there are no laws in place to protect authors.
This is scary, and it reminds me of Fahrenheit 451.
Do not believe Anna’s claims, since physical book sales are plummeting — the main source of income for writers — and shadow libraries are killing the incentive to write. But even more importantly, do not believe AI companies will help you discover and access knowledge.
We might end up with all of humanity’s books digitized and accessible for free, and LLMs capable of writing entire books for us. But there would be no human writers left.
In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read?
I can't help feeling there's some hypocrisy or something here with this call to be outraged at AI companies and scan books now. What about before when they were still mostly locked away from the world? It's only when they're actually being made available to - at least a part of - the broader world that they're a "cultural heritage" worth preserving. Shame.
I'm not saying this in their defense, but as someone who has worked at companies who has scanned books at scale, and generally speaking, I wasn't on site there, but I knew we/they were pretty delicate with the books. And while the kneejerk reaction might be "hey, why would they go through the effort?" -- my guess is that they are following or even hiring people that have done this process in the past (out of laziness) and just follow what works easiest. The literal machinery is not designed to destroy the books for various practical reasons. Books that are bound are easier to be kept in order and work with. Getting a flat scan is done with specialized tools, you don't need to put it on a plate (it would be too slow that way anyway)
All of the above is just to justify my question: Who knows that the books are being destroyed? (I also agree with the general sentiment that there's a good chance these books are just cheap and bulk, they aren't pulling one of a kind rare books.)
I have found that often LLMs are familiar with the contents of SF books.
But I feel poorer, almost deprived, by the fact that all the LLMs I've checked with have NOT been trained on the contents of Eon by Greg Bear.
Google probably has the best collection of high quality scans, followed by the Hathi Trust. None of which are useable by anyone outside of those systems.
Now, in 2026, we're acting like cloning a published book is not technically feasible? That doesn't track. With publishing on-demand, it's easy to imagine a business with digital copies of all these works that they make available for print-on-demand.
The uncomfortable reality is that most of these books are nothing anyone cares about. Even the book sellers in the 404 story call them dead inventory.
Can we get some actual book titles into the discussion so we can focus on facts rather than speculation?
And this is supposed to be concerning?
Op means a lot of those books were made before computers were used for that purpose and the publishers and probably authors no longer exist, so there is no digital copy to just reprint, unless someone scans it themselves and publishes it, risking copyright violation when done at large scale due to possible exceptions to this rule
Like did Icelandic author Þórbergur Þórðarson ever write an a book about Esperanto, and send the only copy of it to Halldór Laxness when he was in Los Angeles? I don‘t know, but it is certainly something he is likely to have done. If such a book exists it would be invaluable to both Icelandic culture and to Esprentists. It likely would have stayed in Los Angeles where nobody would know the significance of it until it ended up in an estate sale, a used book store, and then finally destroyed by an AI company never to be discovered.
My hypothetical is just one of trillions of possibilities. At this scale very likely several of these possibilities will unessiseraly remain unknown unknowns forever.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wastebook
Oh right. But anyway, nobody knows what needs preservation, it's a basic problem of life, somebody usually mentions the BBC throwing out boring old Doctor Who tapes to save archive space because nobody liked it any more at that point in time. Some things should probably be thrown out now and then, I suppose.
This is just one example, but it has become unfortunately common across all social media platforms.
That's pretty silly. My competitor can't ride my bike either, and I didn't have to destroy the bike for that to be true.
And I guess something like encyclopaedia would be good example of book they scan. At one point popular, but with most copies destroyed as no one actually wants them anymore.
https://www.techbrew.com/stories/2026/01/28/anthropic-ai-boo...
I'm sure they have some repository available somewhere. They can even sell the digital copies down the line if they're done with them (only once, of course).
Why would a reduction in human writers cause a complete reduction in motivation to read? There's millions of books already written and it makes zero sense that people would stop writing. People write for hundreds of reasons other than to make money and they created literature before copyright was a thing.
If they we’re just kept where they were you can always say they’ll eventually be scanned or have that potential.
I do believe the issue is a bit overblown but the core of it sounds reasonable to me.
Which exists to enrich Disney and other large corps, while they hide behind artists as a human shield.
>Artists need some form of reward.
Right, as do artists who use the work of other artists as their starting point. Copyright holders aren't bill and bob artist, they are massive corporate trolls throwing around the weight of almost 100 years of our cultural heritage, sucking the marrow from its bones.
>On the other side, buying and destroying copies of rare books is quite scary. We would lose access to those books if they weren’t digitized. They are creating walls around knowledge that they acquired because there are no laws in place to protect authors.
The books are getting digitised into a permanent record of all our cultural heritage. It just sucks we don't have control over it. If only there was a way we could get them digitised AND control our cultural heritage. HMMMMMMM.
>Do not believe Anna’s claims, since physical book sales are plummeting — the main source of income for writers — and shadow libraries are killing the incentive to write.
The incentive to write is being killed by slop groups like 20Booksto50K and Kindle which predate AI by at least a decade. AI just lets them work faster.
>We might end up with all of humanity’s books digitized and accessible for free
Excellent
>But there would be no human writers left.
Unlikely, but there would definitely be no Disneys or Conde Nasts left, which is a massively pro social outcome.
>In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read?
In a world with all books digitised and accessible to read? A huge huge huge incentive. I already partake if books are too expensive where I am. It would take me the rest of my life to read all the books I already want to read. What kind of inane dribble is the idea that copyright makes it interesting to read? I havent even read all of Howard and he's in the public domain (in cool countries at least)
there have been many times I've wanted to pay for an ebook but found that the only places that sell it apply DRM to it, so shadow library it is
More like the consequence of being unwilling to change stupid laws once the stupidity of them is discovered. Nope. Gotta double down on the stupidity instead...
This is what caused the problem in the first place. If people had unrestricted access to content then the world would be a better place. And works wouldn't be so rare that it's worth AI companies buying and destroying them to gain some edge, as well as remain in legal compliance.
The issue is that the copyright holders and book publishers make it hard to make more copies, not that somebody bought a single copy of a book, no matter how rare.
If you could print any book on demand (paying for it), the issue would vanish instantly. And who makes that decision?
Never mind that it's the 200th copy of some 1950's romance novel that nobody will ever care about, every time a library prunes its collection there is outrage.
Second, people write to be read. It takes huge amount of effort too. With no potential reward for it at all, they stop.
Third, we are social animals. If you dont see people reading, if you dont read yourself, you wont even think of writing.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/554/21/bartz-v...
People write without any profit motive today. It's weird of the OP to think of writing in such a narrow space as commercialization.
Not in the EU, UK, or US. "AI" companies were already forced to settle their piracy cases, but often they get a free pass by law enforcement via regulatory capture.
The problem is a book author contracted publisher does not assign legal rights of duplication to a company/individual that buys a legitimate print. It can take over 70 years in some places to become public domain.
The core issue is "AI" firms have so much borrowed cash around, that getting a $1.5B fine for being a pirate is taken as a cost of doing business. The law is simply not equipped to handle this type of hyper-scaling criminal act. =3
Because there would not be human written books about the present. All books would be about the past. But literature is not stuck in time. Today writers talk about topics and feelings that writers of the last century might never know or experienced. Many people read books to better understand the today world (non-fiction) and to better understand their today feelings (fiction).
> People write for hundreds of reasons other than to make money.
Agree, but most of the writing that we have from the past still came with some form of financial incentives. Shakespeare didn't write all of the compositions just because he wanted to express himself. He was making money with theater performances. Many religious writing got patronage by the church. Dante Alighieri had a career as politician, Plato came from an aristocratic family. Writing was reserved to elites because education was expensive and people had to work for food.
Today we are lucky because education is accessible and printing is cheap.
> they created literature before copyright was a thing.
Copyright wasn't a thing because replicating content was hard. Try to manually copy a book...
A targeted modification to the laws could produce most of the benefits for a minor cost.
Like if a game isn't available for sale anywhere in my region, I can get it without breaking any laws. A book is out of print and I can't pay money for it digitally -> free game.
(Why "fair market value?": So that skeezy publishers don't have an online shop with one physical copy of every book they own for $1Trillion just to fulfill the law)
Anthropic's crime wasn't stealing the contents of books and making a derivative work of it, but torrenting a shitload of books. Had they bought all the ebooks, I don't think the lawsuit would've gone anywhere.
https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/internet-archive-loses-...
If the books are rare enough there's a shared cultural value that is being destroyed.
That is not how copyright/trademark/contract laws treat similar works. Most LLM know about Disney Mickey Mouse, and LLM vector search space proximity results will gravitate more accurate reproductions of protected works regardless of granularity of data.
OpenAI simply canceled a popular service to avoid Disney wrath.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-openai-sora-di...
Also, trying to escape directly ripping off notable famous people with nonunion talent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhgYMH6n004
I would say the "AI" firms will keep buying time with all that borrowed cash. Everything that could be scraped has already been stolen, and thus the problem should begin to self-correct. The Shrek movie release market correction history correlation is funny, and a new film is due 2027 in July. =3
Which is also not illegal and within some bounds and exceptions, a protected right across the globe.
Just because they are for sale doesn't mean that no one else would have bought them. Destroying them obviously destroys them, which obviously destroys culture. After all, if the books is destroyed, it will not be read.
Think of it like this. If I buy an island, and there are bunch of people who live on it, maybe they're day laborers or whatever, is it right for me to expel them, if I don't want them? Can't that be straight up genocide, if they have some culture indigenous to the island?
The same is true for books. If you destroy culture, you destroy culture. There is no magic which triggered "but I owned the physical book" which means you didn't.
It doesn't matter what property relationship you have to a thing: whatever property relationship you may have to it, you still do what you do, i.e. you take whatever action with respect to it as you take with respect to it.
Another good example is food. If there's a shortage of it, and you still have a great deal, you may think "eh, what does it matter if I accidentally burn some, I save time through my carelessness" but if there are others who aren't getting any, you may be killing people, and may be despised for how you use "your property". The same is true here. Why should one not despise one who deprives others of rare texts, that may even be lost, and thus cause cultural destruction of some culture that may actually be rare, by treating the carelessly. That rare book on model building or whittling from the 70s may actually be important.
You scan books though and all the value they provide is still fully available in bit form, because books merely contain information. And of course being in bit form means they can be trivially copied, technically. But there's also the legality, which determines how many copies it's legally permissible to retain. The latter becomes the bottleneck for your preservation of "culture" because said culture could be made trivially available to anyone with an internet-connected device, if only rights holders weren't screaming foul (remember what happened with Internet Archive during/after Covid?[0]).
Ultimately there's no destruction involved when books are scanned, just a change of format which helps to ease management and for legal compliance.
[0] https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/internet-archive-loses-...
You're ignoring that they're also scanning them. Which means that we're one copyright law change + some minor incentives away from making these archives actually useful, vs. the book silently getting destroyed in the bookshop's dumpster because nobody bought it.
You say "culture", but is is culture, and culture that was interesting enough to write down. Writing a book in the 70s isn't a trivial thing, there are gatekeepers, editors, publishers etc., even for your little book about local history, and the information is valuable to the community it's about. It affects their internal cultural transmission.
annas-archive.gl/blog, 2026-08-05
A guest post by Anna’s Archive volunteer “u” (translated from Chinese).
TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.
Several AI companies are acquiring large quantities of secondhand books through intermediaries, scanning and destroying them, all to obtain training data “untouched by machines” from before 2022.
Anthropic’s “Project Panama” was exposed in a $1.5 billion copyright settlement. In early 2024, they launched this highly confidential project. The company has spent tens of millions of dollars purchasing millions of paper books, scanning them, training its Claude LLM, and then destroying them all. It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible, but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.
So why destroy physical books? Behind it lies the AI race and the interests of capital:
After AI companies massively scan and destroy physical books, they become the only ones in the world with digital copies. Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers.
This battle for old books reveals a paradox: while promising to “make human knowledge accessible,” AI companies are dismantling the most solid carriers of human knowledge. The public may gain more intelligent AI assistants, but at the cost of a vast amount of knowledge resources disappearing from the public domain.
As the world’s largest shadow library, Anna’s Archive needs a plan to combat the destruction of physical books by AI companies. After all, the emergence of shadow libraries is the greatest miracle of knowledge sharing in the 21st century. Along with other shadow libraries, we’re building a digital library of Alexandria, an inextinguishable light of humanity.
We need the help of volunteers worldwide to scan materials (including books, journal articles, newspapers, magazines, ancient books, rare books, and other materials) from every library and archive around the world and upload them to the shadow library for knowledge preservation, especially those that are easily lost. If every person scans a book, and there are 10 million volunteers worldwide, we can obtain 10 million pieces of invaluable wealth.
Since the beginning of 2025, AI-generated content has accounted for more than half of newly published internet content. A frightening reality emerges: if much of the future content consists of AI-generated books and papers, will humans be able to distinguish them? Once AI has absorbed even the last sentence written by humans on paper, all that will remain on the internet will be AI’s own words. In such a world, how can human civilization be preserved?
Shadow libraries offer the best answer. If you want the memory of human civilization to no longer be monopolized, if you want future generations to be able to read all of humanity’s wealth for free, if you don’t want publishers making a fortune while authors receive little, then please help us. Please make any contribution you can, whether it’s scanning and uploading books, purchasing books and papers to scan and upload, or donating. With the efforts of all humanity, the monopoly on knowledge will be broken. Each of us can make history.
This is a race against time. Our ideal is to scan and upload all the world’s publications before publishers completely block knowledge, and before AI companies scan and destroy all the world’s books and papers.
- Anna’s Archive volunteer “u”