AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late annas-archive.gl/blog, 2026-08-05 A guest post by Anna’s Archive volunteer “u” (translated from Chinese). TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.
- ▪AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late annas-archive.gl/blog, 2026-08-05 A guest post by Anna’s Archive volunteer “u” (translated from Chinese).
- ▪TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers.
- ▪Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Annas-archive |
| Canonical URL | https://annas-archive.gl/blog/physical-destruction.html |
| Publication time | Wed, 05 Aug 2026 22:16:22 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-05T22:25:42.618Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-05T22:25:42.618Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zKXHQuCazu6W · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late annas-archive.gl/blog, 2026-08-05 A guest post by Anna’s Archive volunteer “u” (translated from Chinese). TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever. Several AI companies are acquiring large quantities of secondhand books through intermediaries, scanning and destroying them, all to obtain training data “untouched by machines” from before 2022. Anthropic’s “Project Panama” was exposed in a $1.5 billion copyright settlement.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Annas-archive.
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