Imagine this scene: trucks pull up, unloading millions of printed books, after which they are ruthlessly unstitched, passed through scanners, and then sent to the shredder, to the knife, and to the paper mill.
Do you think this is a grim dystopian scenario? No, this is the harsh reality of 2026. Anthropic, the creators of the Claude neural network, turned millions of physical books into confetti to train their AI model. You might immediately think about how they are techno-fascists who have completely lost their minds. But the wildest thing about this situation is that they didn’t resort to this vandalism out of spite, not by choice, and certainly not out of hatred for literature.
Under the idiotic “intellectual property” laws in the US, if you buy a book and scan it, but keep the physical original on your shelf, you instantly become a pirate who has created an “illegal copy.” It is precisely because of this legal absurdity that authorities constantly persecute free network libraries like Zlib or Anna’s Archive.
To avoid being crushed by multi-billion dollar lawsuits from holders of copyright privileges, corporate bean counters found a loophole: if the paper original is physically destroyed during the digitization process, then everything is legally fine. One copy existed—and one copy remains, it has simply changed format. Therefore, Anthropic literally had to shred millions of books just so that the digital copies would be recognized as “legal.”
Ray Bradbury, in his novel “Fahrenheit 451,” warned us about firefighters burning books. But he, a naive romantic, thought this would happen because of direct state censorship. Bradbury held politicians in too high regard. In our reality, government authorities are destroying millions of valuable books through their moronic laws simply to protect copyright privileges.
And the scale of the tragedy is colossal. It’s not just worn-out pulp fiction going to the knife. Entire second-hand bookstores and warehouses where the rarest works gather dust are being bought up, many of which are only available in one or a few copies. What can never be printed again is being destroyed.
There is one important nuance to this book genocide. Do you know why AI corporations are hunting so fiercely for old paper literature? Because texts published until approximately 2022 are pure, one hundred percent, organic human products. No neural network hallucinations. In the future, the value of such printed books will constantly increase—it is a rock-solid guarantee that the text was written by humans, not by AI. And this unique heritage is now being irrevocably ground into dust.
But let’s look at this situation from the perspective of human survival. The destruction of paper books is playing with fire in the most literal sense. We live in an extremely fragile world. Imagine any global natural or man-made disaster: a massive solar flare, a large-scale EMP strike, a meteorite impact, or a total blackout. Data centers will go up in smoke. The much-vaunted “clouds” will dissipate. Servers will turn into useless scrap metal overnight.
Where will the survivors get basic knowledge about engineering, first aid, water purification, or agronomy? From the Internet? But it’s gone. From libraries? But they were sent to the shredder so as not to upset the copyright holders.
The destruction of physical information carriers leaves civilization absolutely naked and defenseless against any global crisis. A paper book does not ask for electricity; it doesn’t need servers, updates, or a paid subscription. It simply silently holds knowledge, waiting for you to open it.
What conclusion does this lead to? When laws force us to destroy basic knowledge to please a stationary bandit, it is no longer about protecting authors’ rights. It is a real, direct existential threat to the survival of our entire civilization!
