Jermaine Fowler
This week, it was reported that AI labs are buying up rare books in bulk, slicing the spines off, scanning the pages, and destroying the paper. Anthropic was first. Their internal planning document called it "Project Panama" and said they didn't want it known they were working on this. A federal judge ruled it legal. Buying a book buys the right to destroy it, and an upload still leaves only one copy behind. Now a broker sources the books for any lab that wants them and keeps the buyers anonymous. Books printed before 2022 cost more, because those pages are guaranteed to contain no AI writing. The orders arrive as spreadsheets of ISBN numbers. Out-of-print titles are on the lists. Nobody counts how many copies are left before a book goes into the cutter. Some of them may be gone forever.
