**Why is Anthropic destroying books?**

> The AI company apparently found destructively scanning &\#x2018;all the books in the world&\#x2019; easier than dealing with copyright in its quest for training data ‘The risk with generative AI, as this single instance with Anthropic indicates, is that we cede the means of production of our large language lives: that we turn from creators to consumers.’ Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters View image in fullscreen ‘The risk with generative AI, as this single instance with Anthropic indicates, is that we cede the means of production of our large language lives: that we turn from creators to consumers.’ Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters Opinion AI (artificial intelligence) Why is Anthropic destroying books? Kathryn James The AI company apparently found destructively scanning ‘all the books in the world’ easier than dealing with copyright in its quest for training data Wed 5 Aug 2026 07.00 EDT Share Should we destroy all the books in the world? An answer to this question can be found in the court documents of Bartz v Anthropic PBC. The northern California district court case, decided in late July this year, highlighted the improbably named “Project Panama”, one of the AI company Anthropic’s efforts to improve its large language model Claude. “What is Project Panama?” court exhibit 21 asks, in an internal memo. The answer: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The memo advises discretion: “Why use a codename? … \[B\]ecause we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” Destructive scanning was Anthropic’s solution to a problem: in order to “train” Claude, Anthropic had to procure a large, high-quality language dataset, preferably one created before 2022 and the corrupting influence of generative AI on contemporary text. Claude needed as many language combinations as possible, to improve its ability to predict language outcomes. Anthropic needed data, lots of it, of very high quality. Books, as it happens, remain one of the best sources for complex, high-quality, long-form text. As the court’s decision relates, Anthropic hoped that books’ “well-curated facts, well-organized analyses, and captivating fictional narratives” would help “Claude write as accurately and as compellingly as Authors”. The Guardian view on changes to copyright laws: authors should be protected over big tech | Editorial Read more Anthropic had a choice: it could have secured copyright permission to use existing e-books. This would have required the “legal/practice/business slog”, as Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO phrased it , of managing copyright. Rather than engage with the texts’ owners, Anthropic first chose to use pirated sources instead, a decision informing the company’s $1.5bn out-of-court settlement with authors. When that approach seemed too complicated (or, as the court decision phrases: “Anthropic became ‘not so gung ho about’ training on pirated books ‘for legal reasons’”), Anthropic turned to destructive scanning. As it happened, the judge ruled that using proprietary material to “train” an LLM did not, in and of itself, constitute an infringement of copyright. To the court, it would seem, “training” a corporate product is equivalent to training any human, teaching how to read in order to learn how to write. Should we be surprised that destroying printed texts seemed easier to Anthropic than working with their human authors? Either way, the decision to use destructive scanning turned the issue into one of logistics. 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...

**来源信息**
- **来源**：Hacker News：AI 热帖
- **分类**：行业
- **发布时间**：2026-08-05 20:05（北京时间）
- **原文**：[打开原文](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/05/anthropic-ai-destroying-books)