annas-archive.gl/blog, 2026-08-05
A impermanent station by Anna’s Archive unpaid “u” (translated from Chinese).
TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of beingness books to train their models, permanently locking quality knowledge wrong backstage firm servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling connected volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books earlier this taste practice disappears forever.
Several AI companies are acquiring ample quantities of secondhand books done intermediaries, scanning and destroying them, each to get training information “untouched by machines” from earlier 2022.
Anthropic’s “Project Panama” was exposed successful a $1.5 cardinal copyright settlement. In early 2024, they launched this highly confidential project. The institution has spent tens of millions of dollars purchasing millions of insubstantial books, scanning them, training its Claude LLM, and past destroying them all. It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible, but ethically, it’s an highly superior crime against humanity.
So why destruct beingness books? Behind it lies the AI title and the interests of capital:
- It prevents these books from being scanned and utilized for training by competitors.
- It avoids ineligible risks.
- Destroying books is cheaper than lossless scanning.
After AI companies massively scan and destruct beingness books, they go the only ones successful the world pinch integer copies. Knowledge is permanently monopolized connected backstage servers.
This conflict for aged books reveals a paradox: while promising to “make quality knowledge accessible,” AI companies are dismantling the astir coagulated carriers of quality knowledge. The nationalist whitethorn summation much intelligent AI assistants, but astatine the costs of a immense magnitude of knowledge resources disappearing from the nationalist domain.
Shadow libraries
As the world’s largest protector library, Anna’s Archive needs a scheme to combat the demolition of beingness books by AI companies. After all, the emergence of protector libraries is the top occurrence of knowledge sharing successful the 21st century. Along pinch different protector libraries, we’re building a integer room of Alexandria, an inextinguishable ray of humanity.
We request the thief of volunteers worldwide to scan materials (including books, diary articles, newspapers, magazines, ancient books, uncommon books, and different materials) from each room and archive astir the world and upload them to the protector room for knowledge preservation, particularly those that are easy lost. If each personification scans a book, and location are 10 cardinal volunteers worldwide, we tin get 10 cardinal pieces of invaluable wealth.
- For mini scans and uploads, we usually grant nickname and life rank to Anna’s Archive.
- For large-scale scans and uploads of books, we tin thief salary for the scanning fees and different rewards.
Time is moving out
Since the opening of 2025, AI-generated contented has accounted for much than half of recently published net content. A frightening reality emerges: if overmuch of the early contented consists of AI-generated books and papers, will humans beryllium capable to separate them? Once AI has absorbed moreover the past condemnation written by humans connected paper, each that will stay connected the net will beryllium AI’s ain words. In specified a world, really tin quality civilization beryllium preserved?
Shadow libraries connection the champion answer. If you want the representation of quality civilization to nary longer beryllium monopolized, if you want early generations to beryllium capable to publication each of humanity’s wealthiness for free, if you don’t want publishers making a luck while authors person little, past please thief us. Please make immoderate publication you can, whether it’s scanning and uploading books, purchasing books and papers to scan and upload, aliases donating. With the efforts of each humanity, the monopoly connected knowledge will beryllium broken. Each of america tin make history.
This is simply a title against time. Our perfect is to scan and upload each the world’s publications earlier publishers wholly artifact knowledge, and earlier AI companies scan and destruct each the world’s books and papers.
- Anna’s Archive unpaid “u”
Relevant tickets for much information: #223 #187
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