Anthropic’s book-shredding scheme sparks outrage from Glenn Beck

Anthropic, the creator of the Claude AI system, resolved a massive copyright dispute by paying $1.5 billion after internal filings disclosed a program called Project Panama. The initiative involved acquiring millions of physical books—particularly older, used and out-of-print works—then using hydraulic cutters to strip spines and feeding the pages into high-speed scanners. The leftover material was shredded, a step that Glenn Beck highlighted as a deliberate destruction of cultural memory.

Beck emphasized that some of the destroyed books were the sole surviving copies of rare titles, provoking anger among bibliophiles and historians. Although a federal judge deemed the practice fair use, reasoning that the company did not keep both physical and digital libraries, Beck cautioned that without original copies there is no benchmark to verify digital alterations. He called for preserving paper books while still supporting AI development, warning that the loss of originals could enable unchecked changes to digital texts.