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xotwod

[Nick Kapur @nick_kapur]

Terrifying thread.

Due to a legal ruling which lets AI companies off the hook for copyright infringement as long as they destroy the original book, they're buying up millions of rare books, scanning them as AI training data, and then destroying them.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

btw anthropic's internal document on this literally said "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this.”

it was called project panama.

here's exactly what happened:

1: anthropic concluded that books were the cheapest way to build a world-class model because they gave claude curated facts, structured arguments, compelling stories, and writing “an editor would approve of.”

2: once anthropic decided it needed books at enormous scale, its first solution was piracy.

it downloaded 7m+ books from online libraries including libgen. the judge later wrote that although anthropic had legal ways to buy them, it chose piracy to avoid what dario amodei called the “legal/practice/business slog.”

3: that piracy created a massive legal risk.

so in february 2024, anthropic hired tom turvey, the former head of partnerships for google books, to find a legally safer way of obtaining “all the books in the world.”

4: turvey first contacted major publishers about licensing their catalogs.

those attempts didn’t produce agreements, so anthropic chose a route that required no publisher permission: buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers.

5: within about a year, anthropic spent tens of millions acquiring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and 1/1 titles. one vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books in six months.

6: to scan that many books within months, the vendors physically dismantled them.

a hydraulic cutter removed each spine. the pages were trimmed to size, fed as loose sheets through high-speed industrial scanners, and converted into searchable PDFs. the paper remains were then sent for recycling.

7: these PDFs were fed into claude as training data.

the complete collection became a private, searchable anthropic library that the company planned to “store forever.” the scans aren’t available to the public and were never open-sourced.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

Btw, people have survived centuries without data centers but have never survived without clean water.

[4̶𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙡༒ @OGsDontFold]

Y’all aren’t listening: data centers are killing bees. Every third thing you eat? Bees made that possible. They are way more important than any fancy AI or server room we keep prioritizing.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[Ivy⸆⸉ @idkwahatimdoing]

Chappell Roan is banned from a city for something she didn’t do
Zara larsson lost a multi Million Dollar deal for an abortion joke

Ka*ye gets to play stadiums even after praising Nazis and saying how much he admires Adolf hitler.

[jamie @gnuman1979]

Exactly.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

I continue to follow with deep concern the ongoing and escalating violence in the #HolyLand, where, in recent days, many civilians, both in the West Bank and in Gaza, have once again fallen victim. I make a heartfelt appeal for a return to negotiations to achieve a just political solution, founded on the equal dignity and equal rights of every human person. At the same time, I urge the rejection of further military actions and unilateral decisions, especially those that violate the respect for and the status quo of the holy places of every religion.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.

[Ree @ree_tweeting]

This is one of those montages you see in disaster movies but it's happening and no-one is doing anything about it

[Nerdeen Kiswani @NerdeenKiswani]

Pop base actually cover news about Palestine better than most major media outlets, because not enough people are talking about this.

[Guillermo Guantes @LuffysAfrooo]

This the shit that’s gets me so juiced about this planet but also pisses me off bc there’s a group of shit ass people taking this away from me and future generations for money

[🎮L🍉 @20xpadding]

We don't need data centers.

We need more flowers.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

Farmers are reporting that data centres are destroying their bees. I don't think people understand how important this is. Bees pollinate about one in every three bites of food we eat. They're far more important to humanity than any Al tool or data centre.

[Books Behind Borders @MHTruthUltra]

The reason the world is upset with Israel is because of the 700,000+ innocent Palestinians they’ve murdered.

It’s not because they’re Jewish. Hope that helps.

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

I DO NOT want self-driving cars.
I DO NOT want humanoid robots.
I DO NOT want Al in every app I use.

I want clean water.
I want a stable climate.
I want a habitable planet.

[bONGO 🌹 @wariocolosseum]

its clear that nobody wants data centres to destroy their communities