AI Companies Are Buying and Destroying Books

What is happening

The process is not a metaphor. AI companies buy physical books in bulk, pay contractors to cut the spines off, run the loose pages through high-speed scanners, and shred what is left.

The books do not survive. That is the design, not an accident. A bound book is slow to scan and a guillotined one is fast, so the binding goes.

Anthropic* and *Amazon are named in the reporting as participants. Anthropic's internal effort had a name, and a stated ambition: "Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world."

The scale

- Project Panama planned to scan between 500,000 and 2 million books under a single six-month vendor contract.

- Bulk orders placed through the book database ISBNdb reportedly run from 1,000 to 1 million books at a time, often anonymously.

- One small bookseller went from selling around 20 books a week to hundreds a month. Rare booksellers in the Netherlands report being inundated with bulk orders they suspect come from AI firms.

Anthropic settled with authors for $1.5 billion over its use of pirated books, which is the backdrop to buying legitimate copies instead.

Why it is legal

This is the part worth understanding properly, because the practice is not a loophole and calling it one weakens the argument.

The first-sale doctrine says that once you have lawfully bought a copy of a book, it is yours. You can resell it, lend it, or destroy it. Nothing in copyright law obliges you to keep a book you own in one piece.

Fair use covers the scanning. In _Bartz v. Anthropic_, the first court decision on a fair use defence in language model training, converting lawfully purchased print books into digital files for internal training was found to be transformative.

So: buying the book is legal, destroying your own property is legal, and scanning it for training has been held to be fair use. Each step is lawful on its own. The objection is to what the sequence does, not to any single link in it.

Why people object

Authors, archivists, historians and booksellers are not arguing that companies lack the right. They are arguing that having the right does not settle the question.

The sharpest version comes from a bookseller whose stock includes rare and out-of-print titles, who pointed out that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies of a given book. A run of 1,000 anonymous orders does not distinguish between a paperback with a hundred thousand siblings and something with four copies left in the world.

Their line: "I don't like that uncommon books are being pulped."

ISBNdb, which brokers some of these orders, understands the position it is in: "The optics problem is real", with an explicit fear of the headline "AI company destroys two million books."

Why it matters

Most creative rights arguments are about the immaterial thing, the text, the style, the likeness, and whether copying it requires consent. This one is about the object.

Buying a legitimate copy is, by the industry's own account, the ethical upgrade on scraping pirated libraries. The author gets paid, once, at retail. That is a real improvement on Books3. And the physical book still ends up in a shredder.

Two things follow. Scarcity is being destroyed at industrial speed by a process with no reason to notice scarcity, because a scanner cannot tell a rare edition from a remainder. And a one-off retail payment is being treated as settling a claim on a work that will sit inside a commercial model indefinitely. Whether that is a fair trade is a question the first-sale doctrine was never written to answer.

If your position is that AI firms should license properly rather than scrape, this is what the good-faith version currently looks like in practice. Worth deciding whether that is what you meant.

Key takeaways

- Books are bought, unbound, scanned at speed and shredded. Destruction is part of the method, not a side effect.

- Anthropic's Project Panama targeted 500,000 to 2 million* books in one six-month contract, following a *$1.5 billion settlement with authors over pirated material.

- It is lawful. First-sale doctrine covers the destruction, and _Bartz v. Anthropic_ found the scanning transformative.

- The objection is about scarcity and consent, not legality. Bulk anonymous orders cannot tell a rare book from a common one.