All over social media, I'm seeing people furiously angry about this.

"“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”" novaramedia.com/2026/07/29/a...

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— Greg Jericho (@grogsgamut.bsky.social) July 29, 2026 at 10:22 PM

First, this is how AI "reads" old books:

Then this is what the AI company does to the books:

Then the pages are just pulped.
This Gadget Review article in Yahoo News gives the background:

A used bookseller gets an order for 400 volumes. History, botany, regional law, German-language economics. The subjects share nothing in common except one detail: every title has an ISBN. That's the fingerprint. AI companies — or their intermediaries, shielded by NDAs — are systematically buying physical books from secondhand markets, slicing off their spines for high-speed scanning, and pulping the originals. The reason is brutally simple. The internet is now so saturated with AI-generated text that pre-2022 printed books represent the last large, uncontaminated reservoir of human-authored knowledge,...
...The industrial mechanics are precise:
Standard pallets hold 800–1,200 books; buyers scale from pilot orders to 10,000+ volumes per batch, with destructive scanners processing 80–120 pages per minute after spines are cut and originals pulped afterward
Buyers deploy AutoBuy flags on ISBN lists through platforms like Alibris and Biblio — picture a Spotify playlist auto-adding tracks, except the vinyl gets shredded at the end
Anthropic's "Project Panama" spent tens of millions on this exact pipeline, using contractor Datamation to scan books for Claude's training data, with booksellers identifying these buyers by abnormal volume, subject-agnostic orders, and total indifference to pricing, according to court documents reported by the Washington Post
...Not every player chose the shredder route. Harvard University, partnering with Google and Microsoft, released nearly one million public-domain digitized books in 254 languages — no destruction required. Microsoft's Burton Davis called starting with public-domain data "prudent," noting that libraries hold "significant amounts of interesting cultural, historical and language data" missing from online commentary, according to BNN Bloomberg. The existence of that parallel track makes clear that labs have cleaner options. They just don't always take them.... Every out-of-print volume that disappears into a scanner may be the last copy accessible to anyone outside an AI lab's servers. Rare, foreign-language, and low-circulation titles — many never digitized elsewhere — vanish from physical existence after a single scan. Who controls humanity's textual heritage is no longer a question anyone can afford to leave unanswered, especially as the push to build AI Data Centers accelerates the industry's resource acquisition at every level.

The article also describes the judge's reasoning in the lawsuit that now allows this "fair use" of books.

Finally, this is why I believe it matters. Here is a lengthy but chilling description of how AI actually "thinks":

Turning humanity's history and literature over to AI isn't going to work out very well for anyone.
Mostly

Today's Wildfires Update
Social media isn't covering the wildfires as much anymore -- its still bad in BC and in Ontario.

I thought this was interesting

One advantage of a federal agency would be to maintain a higher profile for firefighting year-round

As more than 900 wildfires burn across Canada, prompting evacuation orders and pushing Ontario into its worst wildfire season on record, officials are renewing calls for the country to develop a national wildfire strategy through the creation of a federal agency www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

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— alexvonwitzleben.bsky.social (@alexvonwitzleben.bsky.social) July 29, 2026 at 12:29 PM

Commonwealth Games Update

Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games Medal Table (Latest Update – July 29/30) - 🇦🇺 Australia continues to dominate the medal standings with 103 medals, including 47 golds. - 🏴 England remains third, leading the field in silver medals (27). - 🇮🇳 India sits 8th with 15 medals (3 Gold, 9 Silver, 3 Bronze).

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— geniux.bsky.social (@geniux.bsky.social) July 29, 2026 at 5:49 PM

Sarah Mitton Gold women’s shot put

Alex Bellemarre Silver in men’s 94kg weightlifting

Rose Beaudoin Bronze in women’s 86kg weightlifting

Bronze in men's 3x3 wheelchair basketball

Canada had some excellent fourth-place finishes on Wednesday too - stories are here.