Transcription
Right now, there is a machine sitting in a warehouse where a worker is placing a book into it, and the blade comes down. The spine is cut away, the pages race through a scanner, and then the book is not discarded. It's shredded. Not recycled, not damaged in a flood, not lost in a fire. It's destroyed on purpose because now the digital copy is now considered enough.
Now imagine this is happening again and again and again. Not a hundred times, not a thousand times, millions of times. They want every book on planet Earth to be ingested into the machine. Now, that in and of itself is fine. That's a fine goal. Okay. Not shredded.
Now, Anthropic is one of the largest artificial intelligence companies in the world, and they have launched a project called Project Panama. And its goal is simple and ruthless: acquire every book in the world that you can, scan it, and destroy the original. Why not give them to libraries?
Now, this was not an accident. This is not a warehouse mistake. That's the process. They had already, uh, been raked over the coals, uh, and fined for training on pirated books. So this time, they say, we'll buy them legally by the pallet from the wholesalers all over the world. Then the books went into industrial scanners, and they were shredded.
Now, here's the problem. If you want to do this to new books, fine. You know, there are millions of copies of this book. Fine. But Anthropic knew exactly how you would feel about this. So they issued a private, confidential, internal memo and told the employees to keep this whole operation secret. Quote, "We don't want it to be known what we're working on right now."
Okay. So these rare, rare bookstores started getting phone calls. And these are bookstores where the owner might, you know, sell a book a day, maybe. All of a sudden, they're getting calls: "Do you have these titles?" "Yeah." "You have these 300 titles?" "Yeah." "We'll buy all of them." Bulk orders were arriving. Pallets of books. Rare books. No questions answered. Questions asked. Nothing answered.
Well, when this was found out, this went to court. "You're destroying rare books." Court ruled buying one copy and turning it into a digital copy is fine, um, as long as you destroy the paper one. Keep both, and you have two copies. But you shred the original, and you still only have one. So, you can do that. Really, the destruction of the original became the legal argument that made this okay.
So when the truth finally came out, men and women who have dedicated their lives to protecting books, to protecting history, these rare books, they were obviously outraged. When I read the story, I was outraged. In some cases, the books that have been destroyed were the single remaining copy left known in the world, and it's gone. I don't know. It bothers me. Does that bother anybody else?
Let me tell you why. First of all, I want America to win the AI race. I want American companies building the smartest systems on Earth. Books should help them train these systems. Books are some of the finest thinking humanity has ever done. Compared to the endless flood of machine-generated garbage and slop filling the internet, books are civilization's memories. Scan them, learn from them, preserve them. But never confuse scanning with shredding. Those are two very different acts.
And not every book is the same. Like I said, some exist in the millions. Fine. Fine. Others exist by the dozens. Some may exist in under five, and the machine doesn't know the difference, and apparently the law doesn't know the difference, and more importantly, Anthropic doesn't. They are ordering books by the thousands of ISBN numbers at a time, and they cut everything exactly the same. One rare book, only copy. There are five copies. Let's be absolutely, let's gift Anthropic. There are five copies of this book. They buy one, they destroy one.
This is something that I have been warning about for a long time. I don't know if you'll remember, but I have said it over and over again: Buy paper copies of books. Buy the paper copies of books. A book is more than ink and paper. A book is a witness. Once it's printed, it can't quietly change overnight. Nobody can sneak into your library at night and rewrite page 247. Nobody can update chapter 5 while you're asleep. The printed book stays exactly the way and what it said the day it left the press, will always be that way forever.
A digital file is different. Now, I'm not claiming Anthropic is secretly changing books. I'm saying something more simple and much more dangerous. Without the original, there is nothing left to check against the file. The original is the referee. You destroy the referee, and eventually somebody else decides what the score was. Okay, that's not paranoia. This is history. You cannot destroy the original because any digital copy can be changed, and you have nothing to check it against. And we have been here before. And like I said, it wasn't good.
Let me show you this. This is from 1552, but it started in 1526. An English scholar named William Tyndale. He committed what powerful men considered to be an unspeakable and unforgivable crime. He took the Bible, the New Testament, and he translated it into English. He believed ordinary people should be able to read the scripture for themselves in their own homes. Well, the king didn't think so. Why? Because if the king controlled the books, if he controlled the language, if he had control, and you couldn't read the book, he could tell you anything. Oh, yeah. Here's where, yeah. Yep. Yep. Jesus said the king's right on this one. It's right here. Oh, you can't read it. He could make things up.
So, Tyndale started printing these page at a time. One printer would say, "I never want to see you again, but here, I'll print a hundred pages. Only a hundred pages. That page, I'll print it a hundred times, and then I never want to see you here again." Well, the bishop of London came up with a clever plan. He didn't raid the printers. He didn't even outlaw the books. He bought them once they went on the market after Tyndale died. Okay. He bought them. He'd go into a store and he'd go, "Oh, that's a Tyndale Bible, just like this one." And he'd buy it. And he bought them through a middleman named Augustine Packington. His job was to buy every copy you can find. Pay the premium, pay over, doesn't matter. Get them all, then burn them.
500 years ago, they already understood something we seem to be forgetting here. You don't have to argue against an idea if you can make sure that nobody else has a copy of it. And the story almost ended there. After a, after a short period of time, there were 3,000 copies in the first printing of this book. Only three survive today. Three. If a few ordinary people had not hidden those books, history itself would have been poorer. We remember Tyndale because someone refused to let that last copy disappear.
This copy was in the library of the British Library over 150 years before we were a country. Okay. This particular copy. History is filled with stories like this. The Nazis burned books in the streets, and everybody cheered. Communists go in, they shred the archives. They rewrote the past so the party could never be wrong. It happened in Russia. It happened in China. Authoritarians, ideologues, it happens in Iran. Every regime that feared free thought has always done the same thing. They understood the simple truth: If you control the record of yesterday, you control what people believe about tomorrow.
Now the methods have changed, the slogans change, the technology changes, but the temptation never changes. Now, I am not saying that Anthropic is doing this intentionally to change history or anything else, but it will come. The idea is control the original. And that's why this particular moment deserves your attention right now.
I don't think these companies, these engineers of these companies, are waking up going, "Let's erase civilization." I don't question their intentions. I question the system. Because systems create consequences far beyond the intentions of the people inside them. Today, the books are scanned. Tomorrow, the originals are gone. And the next generation doesn't even know they existed. "No, that book's always been like that." "No, I'm telling you, I read that book 20 years ago." "That's not the same book." "Yeah." "Oh, well, Dad's crazy. You're remembering it wrong." If I had a copy, I could prove it to you.
This is why my charity Mercury 1 and the American Journey Experience. And I mean, this is why I have this, okay? Because I saw in 2008, this kind of stuff is going to happen. And I've been urging you, please buy a hard copy of books. Please don't just buy them online. If it's an important book, buy a hard copy of it, and online if you want. But somebody has to preserve this stuff. We're building a museum and a library in Dallas, Texas. I have now, with David Barton and the American Journey Experience, we have the third largest library of the American founding in the world. I mean, I went, I was standing with the curator, um, in the vault of the National Archives, and I said, "Hey, do you have a copy of this?" He said, "No." "Do you?" I said, "Yeah, we have three. The library, the archives don't even have a copy of it." Okay.
I want copies in the Library of Congress and the National Archives, but it must be also in the hands of private individuals. I'm preserving these books and documents because they have to remain in private hands as well as the public ones. No single government, no single corporation, no algorithm should ever hold the key to the past. Build a library of your own. Help us build ours. But you've got to, you've got to stand against this. You have to stand against this.
What Anthropic is doing by destroying originals, rare originals, is unspeakable. Protect the printed page so no one can kill the last witness. Civilizations survive because knowledge is scattered. Thousands of libraries, millions of homes, countless private collections. They have to be there. No king, no corporation, no government, no algorithm, no single point of failure, no Library of Alexandria. When that thing burned down, we lost all of man's knowledge, and we went into darkness for a very long time.
These AI systems fail on us, or we have to take them down, and they have the only copy left. It's gone. Build AI. Train it on the greatest books ever written. Lead the world. But adopt one rule that every child can understand: Never shred rare books. Never destroy the originals. Because once the last physical copy disappears, history no longer has a referee. And once that happens, the question is no longer what is true. The question becomes: Who gets to decide what's true?