Anthropic Didn't Burn Books. It Did Something Stranger.


 In July 2026, Dutch antiquarian bookseller Pieter de Vries opened an email requesting 3,001 specific titles, mostly academic-press editions from 2020 and 2021, from publishers like Elsevier, Wiley, and Routledge. He assumed it was spam and deleted it. Booksellers in Germany and Switzerland soon reported nearly identical bulk orders, all traced to a little-known outfit called 2077AI. Nobody explained why anyone would want thousands of unremarkable scholarly volumes, and de Vries only later arrived at the likely answer: somewhere downstream, the books would be scanned, stripped of their bindings, and thrown away.


That scan-then-discard pattern is exactly what a Hyperallergic newsletter invoked on August 4, 2026, under the headline "AI Is the New Book Burning." Its target was Anthropic, accused of buying out-of-print books, digitizing them, and destroying the originals to train its Claude models — an act the newsletter called "artistic plunder aimed at gutting our humanity." The framing landed because the underlying facts are no longer speculative. Court filings unsealed earlier in 2026 confirmed an internal Anthropic program called Project Panama, and the company had already agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a related lawsuit over pirated texts.


Book burning earns its charge as a metaphor from scenes like Berlin's Bebelplatz in May 1933, when students and Nazi paramilitaries piled tens of thousands of books by Freud, Hemingway, and others into a public bonfire, staged for newsreel cameras because being watched was the point. Project Panama looks nothing like that. Reporting corroborated by the Washington Post and Bartz v. Anthropic court filings describe the company buying used books by the truckload, hiring vendors able to process up to two million volumes in six months, then shredding each original after scanning it. A federal judge ruled in June 2025 that this exact trade — one destroyed print copy for one retained internal file — counted as fair use.

A member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of 'un-German' books on the Opernplatz, Berlin.

A member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of 'un-German' books on the Opernplatz, Berlin.

Is "burning" even the right word, though? The 1933 bonfires were built to be seen: a public liturgy of erasure meant to frighten writers and announce which ideas no longer had a place in Germany. Project Panama runs on the opposite logic — secretive and industrial, with a machine reading every scanned page more completely than most human readers ever would, then moving the words into model weights while discarding only the paper that once carried them. Call it rendering, not incineration — a factory stripping a car for parts, not a mob torching a library.


The more uncomfortable precedent isn't Nazi Germany — it's American librarianship. In "Double Fold" (2001), writer Nicholson Baker documented how major institutions, including the Library of Congress and the British Library, discarded original bound newspapers and books after microfilming them, defending it as stewardship even as scholars later found the film itself degraded, incomplete, or unreadable. Anthropic's lawyers made a structurally similar argument in court, and won. The company now cast as an arsonist is running a program that resembles, procedurally, what respected cultural institutions did for decades in the name of preservation.

The main reading room in the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC
The main reading room in the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC

None of this changes what can't be undone: the shredded originals are gone regardless of what future courts decide about the models trained on them. If another copy of a 2021 monograph still sits on some library shelf, the "text" survives in the abstract sense a fair-use ruling cares about — but the specific object a Rotterdam bookseller once held, its own creases and marginalia included, does not. Somewhere, a fourth country's booksellers are about to get an email from a company they've never heard of, asking for a few thousand more. [SOURCES] : hyperallergic, washingtonpost, fortune, snopes, techcrunch, authorsguild, wikipedia


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