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Updates about Anna’s Archive, the largest truly open library in human history.

AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late

annas-archive.gl/blog, 2026-08-05

A guest post by Anna’s Archive volunteer “u” (translated from Chinese).

TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.

Several AI companies are acquiring large quantities of secondhand books through intermediaries, scanning and destroying them, all to obtain training data “untouched by machines” from before 2022.

Anthropic’s “Project Panama” was exposed in a $1.5 billion copyright settlement. In early 2024, they launched this highly confidential project. The company has spent tens of millions of dollars purchasing millions of paper books, scanning them, training its Claude LLM, and then destroying them all. It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible, but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.

So why destroy physical books? Behind it lies the AI race and the interests of capital:

• It prevents these books from being scanned and used for training by competitors.
• It avoids legal risks.
• Destroying books is cheaper than lossless scanning.

After AI companies massively scan and destroy physical books, they become the only ones in the world with digital copies. Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers.

This battle for old books reveals a paradox: while promising to “make human knowledge accessible,” AI companies are dismantling the most solid carriers of human knowledge. The public may gain more intelligent AI assistants, but at the cost of a vast amount of knowledge resources disappearing from the public domain.

Shadow libraries

As the world’s largest shadow library, Anna’s Archive needs a plan to combat the destruction of physical books by AI companies. After all, the emergence of shadow libraries is the greatest miracle of knowledge sharing in the 21st century. Along with other shadow libraries, we’re building a digital library of Alexandria, an inextinguishable light of humanity.

We need the help of volunteers worldwide to scan materials (including books, journal articles, newspapers, magazines, ancient books, rare books, and other materials) from every library and archive around the world and upload them to the shadow library for knowledge preservation, especially those that are easily lost. If every person scans a book, and there are 10 million volunteers worldwide, we can obtain 10 million pieces of invaluable wealth.

• For small scans and uploads, we usually award recognition and lifetime membership to Anna’s Archive.
• For large-scale scans and uploads of books, we can help pay for the scanning fees and other rewards.

Time is running out

Since the beginning of 2025, AI-generated content has accounted for more than half of newly published internet content. A frightening reality emerges: if much of the future content consists of AI-generated books and papers, will humans be able to distinguish them? Once AI has absorbed even the last sentence written by humans on paper, all that will remain on the internet will be AI’s own words. In such a world, how can human civilization be preserved?

Shadow libraries offer the best answer. If you want the memory of human civilization to no longer be monopolized, if you want future generations to be able to read all of humanity’s wealth for free, if you don’t want publishers making a fortune while authors receive little, then please help us. Please make any contribution you can, whether it’s scanning and uploading books, purchasing books and papers to scan and upload, or donating. With the efforts of all humanity, the monopoly on knowledge will be broken. Each of us can make history.

This is a race against time. Our ideal is to scan and upload all the world’s publications before publishers completely block knowledge, and before AI companies scan and destroy all the world’s books and papers.

• Anna’s Archive volunteer “u”

Relevant tickets for more information: #223 #187