Books Have Always Been Destroyed. But Never Like This.

Quick summary:

An AI company has been buying up used books by the million and destroying them, scanning the pages for training data and pulping what’s left. Court filings unsealed this year describe the program and an internal note asking that the work be kept from becoming known. A court has ruled that buying and scanning the books this way is legal, and once the work is done, nothing survives to show a book was ever there to lose.

Key takeaways:

→ The books are bought through anonymous middlemen, so the sellers filling the orders rarely know where their stock is headed. From every angle the buying looks like ordinary commerce, which is exactly what keeps the destruction from being seen.

→ Book destruction has a long history, and it changes each time the technology of copying changes. It has shifted twice before. This is the third shift, and it looks nothing like the book burnings most of us picture.

→ This shift is set apart by leaving nothing behind. The words are kept, the object is discarded, and no record says which titles were taken, so the loss can be neither proven nor traced to anyone who might answer for the harm.

→ That reaches past books to anyone who wants to know things firsthand. When the only surviving copy is sealed inside a system no outsider can consult, verifying what it says becomes impossible, and we are left trusting whatever summary we are given.

“We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” The sentence appears in an internal Anthropic planning document made public through court filings in Bartz v. Anthropic, the copyright class action that three authors filed in 2024. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, called the program Project Panama. Its stated mission fit in one sentence: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”

Destructive scanning means cutting a book from its binding, feeding the loose pages through a scanner, and discarding the book afterward. According to the court, Anthropic spent millions of dollars buying millions of print books, often used. Its service providers removed the bindings, cut the pages, scanned them into searchable digital files, and discarded the books. Anthropic kept the scans in an internal digital library and used books from that library to train the AI systems behind Claude.

The lawsuit initially concerned another source of Anthropic’s library: more than seven million pirated book files the company had downloaded. The court treated the two acquisition paths differently. It held that Anthropic could lawfully buy print books, convert them into searchable digital files for internal use, and discard the physical copies; because the resulting files remained inside the company rather than being redistributed, that practice was fair use. It reached the opposite conclusion about the books Anthropic had downloaded from pirate sites and retained.

Companies announce the programs they are proud of; Anthropic tried to keep this one invisible. The January unsealing supplied the project’s codename and the instruction to stay silent. The instruction anticipated what the company did not want authors, booksellers, and the reading public to see: books bought by the million, cut apart, scanned, and discarded. Anthropic didn’t publicly announce Project Panama before court records made it public.

The silence has no precedent. Books have been destroyed for as long as they’ve been made: by conquering armies and offended churches, by censors with lists and mobs with torches, by floods and fires, and by budgets that let the roof leak. Some of it was fast and public. More of it was slow and official. All of it, loud or slow, could be recognized for what it was. A person watching knew that books were being lost. History kept what record it could. But what’s happening now carries no such signature. From the outside, nobody could tell that books were being destroyed at all.

Anthropic hired a man named Tom Turvey in February 2024 and gave him a mission the court record repeats in one sweeping phrase: obtaining all the books in the world. Turvey came to the job from Google Books, the project that spent the 2000s digitizing library collections on machines engineered to turn pages gently, so that every book survived its own scanning. Anthropic took the opposite approach. Gentle machinery never entered the plan. Over roughly a year, the company spent tens of millions of dollars buying millions of print books, sheared off their spines, fed the loose pages through high-speed scanners, and pulped what remained. Vendor proposals in the court records described converting up to two million books in six months, some eleven thousand a day.

Destroying the books solved a financial problem first. A bound book must be scanned page by page, slowly and at cost. Once cut apart, the same volume becomes a stack of loose paper that can run through a sheet feeder at speed. Across millions of volumes, the difference in output determined the method.

The legal significance emerged later. In June 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled on the authors’ claims. For the books Anthropic had bought and destroyed, he found the copying to be fair use: the rule in American copyright law that allows limited copying without an author’s permission (the way a critic can quote a novel in a review). His reasoning turned on replacement. Anthropic bought one physical copy, made one digital copy, and destroyed the original—so the number of copies in the world never grew. In the law’s eyes, the scan simply took the book’s place, a change of format. If Anthropic had kept both the book and the scan, the number of copies would have doubled and the fair-use argument would have weakened. Pulping the originals helped make the copying legal.

The pirated downloads fared differently in the same ruling. For those more than seven million files, Alsup rejected Anthropic’s fair-use defense. He emphasized that Anthropic had built a permanent, general-purpose library it expected to keep indefinitely, not a temporary collection for a defined training task. “None is even offered here except for Anthropic’s pocketbook and convenience,” he wrote.

The ruling left the company facing a trial over damages, and Anthropic settled instead: the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion. A judge granted the deal final approval on July 20, the largest copyright class settlement in American history. Under the deal, Anthropic will delete the pirated digital files. Critically, the deal concerns those files, not the millions of physical books the company bought and pulped. Copyright protects the text of a book—the creative expression of an idea—not the paper on which those words were printed. Once Anthropic lawfully owned a physical copy, copyright law generally didn’t prevent it from destroying that object. The books could be destroyed without creating the kind of copyright violation at issue in the case.

But books don’t enter a library by themselves: somebody had to sell the company all those books. The court records describe Anthropic purchasing through vendors. This spring and summer, booksellers across Europe described the other side of such a trade: unusually large, eclectic orders placed through intermediaries, with the ultimate buyer unnamed. Tomás Kenny of Kennys of Galway called one order for books “bananas”—a mix of titles no library would plausibly assemble. Whether any particular order came from Anthropic cannot be established from outside the transaction. Nor is Anthropic the only possible customer: other AI companies have also been reported to be acquiring books at industrial scale.

The reported market is built to keep the buyer at a distance. Brokers can aggregate inventory and manage bulk orders without disclosing who is ultimately acquiring the books. ISBNdb, a book-data company, briefly advertised a prospective book-sourcing service for AI developers that promised confidentiality; its marketing explained the appeal bluntly: “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.” (After reporting drew attention to the page, ISBNdb removed it and said the proposed service had never been launched.) The result was not merely secrecy about the buyer, but uncertainty about the fate of the books.

What Anthropic is doing belongs to a history far older than the company. Rebecca Knuth, a professor of library science, named the practice in 2003: libricide, the systematic destruction of books and libraries, usually carried out or authorized by a government. Her subject was the twentieth century’s state-sponsored campaigns, but the practice runs back as far as writing does. The scenes that come to mind of this are the same few: students feeding bonfires in Berlin in 1933, Sarajevo’s national library burning under siege in 1992. But behind those scenes, the record is wider and stranger than they suggest. Bonfires were rarer than the memory of them. Most destruction arrived slowly and with permission, through purges, censors, wars, and simple neglect.

A strict reading of that definition would leave Anthropic out, reserving libricide for the destruction of entire libraries. But that distinction collapses here. The world’s secondhand book trade functions as one enormous collection, scattered across thousands of shops and sellers with no central address. Buying it up by the pallet and pulping it empties a library all the same, just one whose shelves span continents.

Destroying a book has meant different things in different centuries. The difference has always come down to copying, because how books are copied decides how many of any one book exist. When copies are scarce, destruction can erase a work from existence. Once copies are everywhere, destruction can only send a message about one. To me, that line sorts the history of libricide into eras, and what distinguishes each one is what its destruction leaves behind. The result is my own framework, a chronology by residue that I haven’t found anywhere in the scholarship: two eras completed, and a third that has just begun.

For thousands of years, every copy of every book was made by hand. A single volume could take a scribe months, so most works existed in a few manuscripts, and some in only one. Under those conditions, destroying the object destroyed the work, completely and forever. I call this the first era: the era of destruction as annihilation. The word descends from the Latin ad nihil, meaning to reduce or bring something to nothing. In this era the meaning was literal. When Diego de Landa, a Spanish friar in colonial Yucatán, burned twenty-seven Maya codices in 1562, the texts inside them went to ash. No copies of them existed anywhere on earth, so entire bodies of Maya history and belief ended in one afternoon’s fire. The library of Alexandria met the slower version of the same fate, declining through centuries of purges and neglect until its losses ran past counting. What the first era left behind was dust, and one thing more: knowledge of the loss. Contemporaries recorded what had burned. We can still mourn the codices, because the one thing annihilation couldn’t destroy was the memory that the books had existed.

The printing press ended that era within a century of its invention. Once a title could exist in hundreds or thousands of identical copies spread across cities and countries, fire lost its reach. Burning a book now destroyed only an object, since the work lived on in every other copy, safely out of range. Destruction continued anyway, though, serving a different purpose entirely. I call this the second era, the era of destruction as spectacle (a word descended from the Latin spectare, to watch). By the twentieth century, watching had become the entire point of burning a book. The clearest case is the Nazi bonfires of May 1933, when German students burned tens of thousands of volumes in public squares, in front of rolling newsreel cameras. Almost none of the works truly died in those fires, because the titles on the pyres existed in editions across Europe and America (many of which remain in print today). Erasing the books was never the goal, since erasure had stopped being possible. The fires existed to be seen, a threat performed first for the crowd in the square and then for everyone who watched the footage. What the second era left behind was the opposite of ash: photographs and visuals of fires that consumed real books but reached nothing beyond them. Once a book existed in enough copies, burning one no longer removed it from the world. It announced that the book had no place in the world to come.

Measured against those two eras, what Anthropic is doing fits neither. In the first era, destroying the object meant losing the work. Anthropic’s scanners preserve every word, so the works survive. In the second era, the objects were beside the point and the burning was public theater. This time the objects are destroyed by the millions, and the destruction says nothing at all; it’s not a message but a method. The company ordered the operation kept out of sight. A destruction that erases no text and performs for no one, run at industrial speed, matches neither pattern. The technology of copying has crossed another threshold, the way it did when the press replaced the scribe. What it means to destroy a book now has changed again to match. We’ve entered the third era.

What exactly went into the scanners is the question nobody outside can answer. The unsealed documents show the program favored what its leader called “less common” books, harder-to-find titles over mass-market ones, without ever defining where less common ends. After the claims went viral this summer, the fact-checking site Snopes investigated whether rare books were being pulped. Anthropic told Snopes that “none of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy ‘rare’ or ‘antiquarian’ books.” The assurance can’t be tested from outside, because no list of what was bought has ever been made public.

Anthropic’s own planners estimated the world has about 130 million distinct books. The program destroyed millions of copies, most of them ordinary used books with plenty of surviving duplicates. Even where duplicates survive, a scan keeps only the words. A physical copy carries evidence too, like a censored paragraph that marks one printing apart from another, or an owner’s name inked inside the cover. But the deeper danger sits in the margin nobody can see. Anthropic aimed for “uncommon” titles while recording nothing public about which copies were destroyed. For a book surviving in only a handful of copies anywhere, one bulk order can potentially take the last one. Whether that has already happened is a question no one on the outside knows for sure. The impossibility of answering what was destroyed is what’s new.

The buying also leans toward older books, for a reason that has nothing to do with rarity. Since around 2022, text written by AI has spread across the internet, mixed in with everything people write and mostly impossible to tell apart. That creates a problem for the companies training new models. Feeding a model text written by other models tends to degrade the results, so the builders want sources guaranteed to be human. A book printed before the technology existed carries that guarantee on its copyright page. Old print has become a raw material, valued for the one quality the internet can no longer promise.

One more feature separates this era from the last one. Spectacle-era destruction wanted an audience; this destruction wants the opposite. The buyer is after the text and has no message to send. In fact, attention to its process can only slow the buying down. Taken together, the features of this era line up: the works survive inside a black box, the objects vanish by the millions, no public record exists, and the operation itself prefers to work in secrecy. I call this the third era, the era of destruction as disappearance. The word rests on the Latin apparere, to come into view, with a prefix that reverses the motion. A disappearance is a departure from visibility. The word fits this era at every layer, from the unseen sales to a program that only appeared when a court forced it into view.

Every one of these books, preserved to the letter, can now be read by no one. The scanned texts sit in Anthropic’s private collection, a library with no reading room and no public catalog. Models trained on that collection are built to avoid quoting it at length, because reproducing long passages for users is the copyright violation no court has excused. So the machines answer questions about books without ever showing the books themselves. When someone asks a model about a title that survives only in that collection, what comes back is a summary, written in the model’s words, with the original nowhere in reach.

That arrangement changes something basic about how we can know things. Checking a claim against its source is the foundation of thinking for ourselves. When we can pull the book, find the page, and read the passage in context, we get to judge whether the summary was faithful and whether the quote meant what someone claims it meant. Remove the book and that judgment has nowhere to stand. We’re left taking the summary on trust, with no way to confirm and no standing to doubt. Whatever the model says the book said becomes, for all practical purposes, what the book said. That’s a transfer of authority from the page to the tool, from a source anyone could check to an answer nobody can. The transfer happens one unreachable book at a time.

Maddeningly, every piece of this design is legal. Each one also removes a question that used to have an answer. The anonymous purchasing means nobody can list which books were destroyed, so nobody can rule out that some were the last copies anywhere. With the collection sealed, nobody can compare a stored text against the printed original it replaced, so even perfect fidelity can never be shown. As for whether the buying ever stopped, nobody outside knows that either, since the only reason anyone knows it started is that a piracy lawsuit dragged the records into the open. None of this took a conspiracy, only ordinary business decisions about what to disclose, all of them legal and every one of them closing a door.

One more thing disappears along with these books: the ability to mourn them. The previous era’s destruction left survivors who could testify to what was lost. Alexandria’s losses were lamented for centuries. Sarajevo’s librarians catalogued what their fire took. The third era leaves no one who can even compile the list. A loss we can name is a wound. One we can't name is just a world grown slightly smaller, with nothing to point to and no way to prove it. A librarian would describe the situation in the profession’s terms: no accession record and no deaccession record, a transaction that leaves no ledger for anyone to audit. Put simply, they’ve created a system in which they can’t be held accountable for the system they’ve created. That understanding defines destruction as disappearance: the loss was built, from the start, to be impossible to establish.

The concealment had one structural weakness: a program that buys millions of books needs sellers, and a company that breaks the law can be sued. Sellers and courts are the two doors into the secrecy — sellers see every order even when they can’t see the buyer, and courts can compel what the company won’t volunteer. Everything now known about the program came through one door or the other. Authors sued and forced the internal records open. Booksellers noticed matching orders across two countries and brought them to reporters; one worked with the journalists at 404 Media to hide a tracking device inside a shipment of books, and the tracker led to an Amazon warehouse outside Las Vegas — evidence that a retail giant appears to be running a scanning program of its own. Within weeks, at least one supplier that had been advertising bulk books for AI training pulled the offer. No regulator opened either door. Every disclosure came from the people the company bought from or the people it answered to in court.

Some sellers went further than noticing. Once Tomás Kenny, whose Galway shop had received one of the strange 5,000-book orders, worked out where books like his might be headed, he said publicly that Kennys wanted no part of scanning aimed at extracting intellectual property. His shop had been the second in the world to put its books online, back in 1994; it now became one of the first to refuse the trade that takes books offline for good. Kenny could refuse because he had worked out the destination, which is exactly the discovery the brokers’ anonymity exists to prevent. A trade that hides its purpose from its own suppliers has already answered the question of whether the suppliers would approve.

The same kind of attention is available to the rest of us, because most of us eventually stand over a box of books deciding where they go, after a move or the clearing of a family house. That box is where all of this arrives at our own doorstep. A seller, or any of us selling to one, can now ask a question that has a good reason to be asked: where do these books go next? The anonymity that keeps this market running survives only as long as nobody asks. For material that might be scarce, like a town history or a box of local records, the open market is no longer the safe default. A library’s special collections desk exists for exactly that kind of donation. And the same habit applies at the other end of the pipeline: when a model summarizes a book for us, we can treat the answer as a starting point and go find the book itself, while findable copies still exist. Each of those is a small act of keeping track.

That kind of record-keeping has been the difference between the eras all along. Each era’s destruction left a residue, a testament of a kind. The first era of annihilation left ashes and knowledge of the devastation. The second era of spectacle left photographs of the fires and the threat those fires were meant to carry. Ours, this third era of disappearance, leaves no ash, no image, and no list. But what’s still open is the record itself: whether one gets kept, and whether anyone outside can access it at all.

The three eras are a framework I built for this piece, and I want to take it further (it’s such fascinating stuff!): a full treatment of how book destruction has changed across five thousand years and what the third era asks of the people living in it. Before I build it though, I’d love to get a temperature read on the format you’re most interested in.

The poll's anonymous, so if you'd want this for a group or an organization, leave a comment, reply to this email, or send me a DM on Substack so we can connect.

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