During the Anthropic lawsuit, Tom Harvey, who previously participated in the creation of Google Books before leading Anthropic’s “Project Panama” digitalization project, confirmed that the AI firm hired several document scanning companies. Datamation Information Services, which offers high-volume, non-destructive, and destructive book scanning services, was one of them. The former method employs different tools, like overhead scanners, flatbed scanners, or V-shaped imaging systems. The latter method, on the other hand, would have personnel gut the books and feed the individual pages into a high-speed industrial scanner. Logically, AI companies opt for the destructive route since it is more efficient and lower-cost. The result is the destruction of millions of books.

Obviously, printed books represent a treasure trove of information for AI. However, many debate the ethics of removing books from circulation since it is uncertain whether AI companies filter the rare or even out-of-print books from the common titles during digitalization. The other major issue is that scanned books go directly into a private database to train AI, which the general public does not have access to. True, we will have smarter AI, but at the cost of the information not being available to future generations.

Source [web-archived; 2026-07-28_18-53-43Z]

Related: AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books… (…documents about its plan to scan millions of books… to destroy the books in the process…) [web-archived; 2026-07-21_14-58-43_Z]