I Think Therefore I Am 𓂀

CS student | ⏸️ AI | Artist

[Barbarian Herodotus @BBHerodotus]

After seeing a post on it yesterday, I’ve looked more deeply into Anthropic’s purchasing and destruction of millions of used books.

They spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring and destroying books to train their AI model, Claude.

They knew, from the beginning that it would be unpopular. They knew what they were doing, was wrong.

An internal memo from 2024 stated:

“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”

“We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Why used books?

Companies like Anthropic and Meta found it impractical to gain permission from authors and publishers to use their work.

So instead, they stole their work to train their product through mass purchases of used books and through pirating them from the internet.

The authors of these works, didn’t receive a dime for their efforts. These companies stole the hard won literary talent of others to train machines to replace the victims of their theft.

Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann personally downloaded countless books for this purpose from LibGen, a book pirating website.

When a new book piracy website debuted in 2022, Mann sent an email sharing the link with his employees stating: “just in time!!!”

Meta employees were wary about the piracy of books, with one engineer writing, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

Anthropic purchased millions of books, in batches of tens of thousands from Better World Books and U.K.-based World of Books.

They then used a “hydraulic powered cutting machine” to slice off the spines of these books before scanning them. Finally, the remains of these books were picked up for recycling.

Feel free to use AI, it’s a free country.

But remember that, if you use Claude, that Anthropic has committed a great wrong, and they knew that they were doing it from the beginning.

Below is an image, from a court case, of a warehouse full of used books, that instead of being held and read by you and your children, have been destroyed forever.

AI is inevitable, but spend your money on the companies who do good, and do not knowingly commit evils.

May the most moral company win.

[I Think Therefore I Am 𓂀 @BabyFlicka]

Master plans can sometimes seem unfinished

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

Elon Musk Wealth
2012: $2 billion
2026: $719 billion

Jeff Bezos Wealth
2012: $18.4 billion
2026: $255 billion

Mark Zuckerberg Wealth
2012: $17.5 billion
2026: $212 billion

Federal Minimum Wage
2009: $7.25
2026: $7.25

Obscene. We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage.

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

This is outrageous.

A 37-year-old high school physics teacher was arrested and dragged out of a city commission meeting in Kansas for 𝗰𝗹𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 in support of opposing a new data center.

In the video you can hear one of the city commissioners call on the man to be arrested.

𝗘𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆’𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗶𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗼 𝗺𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝘀 𝗰𝗹𝗮𝗽 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗱.

This is not only a violation of the first amendment, but it exposes that there really is no democracy in this country. That if people go through the “approved channels” to make their voice heard they will still be arrested.

𝗜𝘁 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝗮𝗿 𝘁𝗼𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗿𝘂𝗽𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘁���𝗮𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.

[(((Bvweir))) #He.Must.Be.Stopped. @Bvweir]

This about sums it up

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

I can’t wrap my head around an economy where nursing homes cost enough to bankrupt families, yet the aides caring for our grandparents still rely on food banks. Or where daycare can consume an entire parent’s paycheck, while the people providing that care still can’t earn a living wage and need a second job. Something about that math just doesn’t add up.

[FactPost @factpostnews]

Major chemical company Chemours is pushing the Trump administration to fast-track approval of a new PFAS forever chemical for use in data centers.

Trump purchased up to $165,000 in Chemours stock last year.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

"Data Center Alley" a section of Virginia with the densest concentration of data centers in the country, caused the power to flicker across the East Coast.

On Wednesday, July 22nd the electricity flickered on and off for about 10 minutes throughout the Eastern U.S., from Chicago to Boston to Miami.

The cause appears to be a concentration of data centers straining the grid.

Video from: @NBCWashington

[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.

[Don Winslow @donwinslow]

There are MORE than 600 casualties in Trump's Iran war. My sources were right in March and are telling me again that the Pentagon is lying to you AGAIN.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Trump is on the verge of changing nuclear safety regulations so that the government no longer tries to keep human exposure to radiation as low as possible.

For over 50 years the standard has been keeping radiation exposure "as low as reasonably achievable."

Now under Trump the top nuclear regulator in the U.S. is preparing to scrap this decades-old safety rule.

https://t.co/dLKyXNMdAx

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔I'd point you back to the 404 Media reporting. The bookseller they interviewed said his own inventory is full of uncommon, out-of-print, and foreign-language titles, and some of the pulped copies may be among the last still in circulation.
So museum pieces aren't ending up in bulk lots, granted. Uncommon books are, and those are the ones getting lost for good. Public domain also only settles the text question. A physical copy carries more than the words, and once it's pulped, it's gone.
The used booksellers themselves are the ones publicly worried about this.
https://t.co/xeN19P3aPp

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@HedgieMarkets I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

@axcilla 🦔Once the physical original is gone, there's nothing left to check the digital copy against. That's what makes destroying primary sources different from scraping a website.

[PGT @PG_Ting]

@HedgieMarkets The physical copies are artifacts that need to be preserved, not destroyed. We are becoming increasingly stupid, careless and thoughtless, everywhere you look.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

WHAT I HAVE BEEN WARNING FOR DECADES IS HERE, THANK YOU FOR YOUR BOOK BURNING TOO ANTHROOIC.

“Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email”

We are the amnesia generation and this is The Great Forgetting.

[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🤗

[FactPost @factpostnews]

The richest 34 Americans now control $2.6 trillion in wealth, equivalent to 12% of U.S. national income.

This is the worst wealth concentration in U.S. history.

[Shea Jordan Smith @sheajordansmith]

For 32 years, Republicans have controlled every statewide elected office in Texas.

When Ann Richards left the Governor’s mansion in January 1995, Texas was ranked among the top 10 states in education, 5th in reading, and 6th in math.

After three decades of one-party rule?

Texas has dropped to 41st in education overall, 34th in math, and 44th in reading.