Destroying books to get data

Bedtime stories with Baba [father]. Every night, before sleeping, my dad would sit with me, and we would read a book together. Since I was one. Or maybe even younger. The bedtime stories eventually morphed into evening and morning-time stories because I couldn’t wait for my dad. The eagerness to figure out what the climax would be in ‘The Twits’ gnawed at my brain, and I just had to read. Growing up, my love for reading grew day by day, and by the time I reached my teens, I had already finished reading more books than I could remember (thanks to my parents and their respect for reading). And yes, I believe that reading must be respected. Books must be respected before they are loved.

Whenever I would be reading and I would accidentally fold a page or hold the book in a way that would result in a bent spine, my dad would warn me not to do that. And now the very spines of books are being ripped off. As time went by, I have kept my books in pristine condition because books, to me, are not just mere collections of paper; rather, they are treasures that must be protected. However, like every resource on this planet, humans have found a way to endanger this treasure as well.

According to The Telegraph, it has been reported that at the beginning of 2024, the popular artificial intelligence research company named Anthropic who built Claude, known to be one of the most reputable AI chatbots, recruited Tom Turvey to ‘destructively scan all the books in the world’. And eventually, this led to the birth of Project Panama. In the summer of 2025, the copyright lawsuit Bartz v Anthropic PBC led to a federal judge ruling that scanning legally purchased physical books into digital copies, despite the fact that the original copies could be destroyed, constituted transformative fair use. Similarly, federal judges gave the same rulings in copyright cases involving OpenAI and Meta. However, in another case, a federal judge approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in 2025, which would require Anthropic to pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after the company used pirated copies of their works to train Claude.

So Artificial Intelligence is demolishing books to become one.

As alarming as that sounds (and it is), under Project Panama and similar projects, Artificial Intelligence companies are tearing, cutting, and shredding books to feed information to train their models. These AI models constantly rely upon the feeding of information in order to function, and as they continue to be developed further, they pose dangerous consequences because information is never enough for them. The birth of AI was intertwined with the existence of data. An AI model can only be as powerful as the data that you feed into it, and these models are constantly hungry for more data. When they utilised and exhausted every possible channel, they turned to books, which are one of the sources of data.

As the world becomes more engrossed in the world of Artificial Intelligence and people now resort to doom-scrolling rather than picking up a newspaper or reading a book in their free time — the importance of books continues to diminish. Books are not just meant to be prioritised during one’s educational journey; rather, they are tools that shape your mind, expand your knowledge, instil emotions such as empathy, and make you grow. Reading allows you to understand people and their perspectives; it improves your critical thinking, it strengthens your cognitive process, and research even shows that it helps with sleep and reduces stress. There are countless benefits of reading books, and they are imperative in moulding a mind, especially when one is young. If Anthropic acquired to destroy the very thing that makes us think, after they have already tried to mimic the human mind — we are heading towards a catastrophe.

Research and statistics keep popping up, depicting something that has never been witnessed before. Newer and upcoming generations are considered to be less cognitively capable than previous generations. And instead of being concerned about how Artificial Intelligence is slowly transforming us into dependent beings, we have ignored how it is eradicating the things that would make us think. Since the rise of AI, there has been an increased reliance on it for everything. Be it students writing assignment papers, or people just questioning their life decisions, or anything mundane — most people turn to AI. However, it is ironic that AI runs on data and that data is fed by us, by existing information, and by books. The machine is slowly becoming independent while making everything dependent upon it, and this is a crisis that people fail to recognise. Another ironic aspect would be Anthropic’s CEO being a literature graduate but running a process that would destroy the very foundations of literature.

Books exist because we need them. Destroying books means destroying stories, cultures, traditions, concepts, ideas — basically everything that makes us human. It is imperative that we focus on formulating and adapting policies that target this and ensure tighter controls and regulations over these practices. There should be laws banning the tearing, cutting, and shredding of books, and there should be oversight bodies that govern this. When such a practice is reported, the organisation or accused should be fined accordingly. It is high time that concerns and alarms over this news translate into policies and rules because when power for hunger and data goes unchecked, it has dire consequences.

The hunger and race for data have led to data centres popping up everywhere. Pakistan also recently developed its largest data centre, known as Sky47 AI cloud in Islamabad. These data centres and AI models keep slurping our resources — consuming water, polluting the environment, and lessening our ability to think, and now, erasing books. Feeding itself data after destroying existing data. These practices must be curtailed before we completely move towards a world without books because a future without books is a bleak one.