L'achat de livres que l'on jette par la société d'IA (AI) Anthropic

 " Anthropic achète des millions de livres rares, les numérise et les détruit parce que, légalement, la destruction est l'option la plus sûre. C'était un élément de l'intrigue dans le roman de Vernor Vinge, "The Rainbow's End", que j'ai lu il y a 20 ans. "



Anthropic achète des millions de livres rares, les numérise et les détruit parce que, légalement, la destruction est l'option la plus sûre. C'était un élément de l'intrigue dans le roman de Vernor Vinge, "The Rainbow's End", que j'ai lu il y a 20 ans.
grok is this true!?!??! are they really buying rare books and then destryoing them?!!??! https://x.com/sivori/status/2052567312088047754?s=20

 
Yes, the core of the claim in that X post is true—but with an important correction: it's not "rare books."
Anthropic (the AI company behind Claude) really did buy millions of physical print books, cut them up (often by slicing off the spines with hydraulic machines for fast flat-bed scanning), scan the pages, and then destroy the physical copies. This was part of an internal effort they called "Project Panama," aimed at feeding massive amounts of book content into their AI training data. Court filings from a copyright lawsuit against them (unsealed in late 2025/early 2026) confirmed the details, including internal docs saying they wanted to "destructively scan all the books in the world."
washingtonpost.com
They did this for legal reasons: under U.S. copyright law and the "first-sale doctrine," once you buy a physical book, you can do what you want with that specific copy (including destroy it). Scanning a purchased physical book + immediately destroying it (instead of distributing or keeping unauthorized digital copies) was ruled fair use in the case. A tech analyst (
@gwern
) highlighted exactly this "perverse implication" of the ruling back in June 2025—the screenshot in the post is from him. Destroying the books was the "safest" way to avoid bigger legal risks around piracy claims.
arstechnica.com
The second image in the post is a spot-on summary from Vernor Vinge’s 2006 novel Rainbows End (often stylized that way), which literally predicted a future "Librareome Project" where books are industrially shredded for high-speed digitization—same "throughput" justification, same protests from book lovers. The post nailed that parallel.
The "rare books" part is the exaggeration

    Anthropic bought bulk used/common print books from major retailers and wholesalers—not rare, first-edition, or collectible ones. Court records and reporting explicitly note there’s no indication they went after rare books.
    news.ycombinator.com
    The goal was scale and getting text that wasn’t already easily available online. They only needed one copy per title for training.
    There has been recent buzz about AI-related buyers scooping up obscure/old used books from sellers (possibly for training data gaps), but that’s still not the high-value rare/collectible market. It hasn’t tanked prices for true rare books.

This isn’t some shadowy plot to erase culture—it’s a (controversial) side effect of the AI training data race under current copyright rules. Book destruction for digitization/scanning isn’t new in principle (libraries and publishers have pulped overstock for decades), but the scale and purpose here sparked the backlash.
The post is basically right about what Anthropic did and why, and the sci-fi echo is cool. Just swap "rare books" for "millions of ordinary print books" and you’ve got the accurate version. Wild that Vinge saw it coming 20 years ago, though.

 

A la BU sciences de Nantes, toutes les ouvrages des prix Turing sont partis à la benne. Et bien d'autres. On a remplacé par des Mangas.

L'INRIA a détruit ses bibliothèques. 

Vous pouvez chercher ces centaines d'ouvrages sur la Toile. En vain. Il m'est plus facile de trouver mes ouvrages dans une bibliothèque universitaire en Australie ou à la British Library.

Sur le site de la BNF, vous trouvez la notice. Mais peut-être que les parisiens eux ont accès aux ouvrages sans avoir à prendre le train.   

 

Si vous vous arrêtez sur un arrêt d'autoroute vous trouverez plein d'ouvrages de pipeautique et de zéphologie. 

 

P.S. N'oubliez pas de prendre vos granules d'homéopathie sans les toucher du doigt. Ne vous fiez pas au Vatican et à votre curé qui vous donne l'hostie dans la main.