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AI Overview
The French public and cultural sectors have responded with intense alarm, deep cultural unease, and immediate legal retaliation following unsealed U.S. court documents exposing “destructive scanning”—the practice where AI firms like Anthropic buy physical books, slice off their bindings with hydraulic cutters, scan the pages, and pulp the paper to secure “pure,” human-written, pre-2022 data. [1, 2, 3]
Because the French perspective heavily prioritizes l’exception culturelle (the belief that cultural goods are not mere commodities), the reaction has transcended standard technological debate, triggering sharp resistance across several layers of society.
1. Legal and Institutional Retaliation
While a U.S. federal judge ruled that destructive scanning is legally protected under the “first-sale doctrine” (provided the company buys the print copy fair and square and destroys the physical book to maintain a 1:1 format shift), European and French laws do not mirror this structure. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Publishers Launching Lawsuits: Vincent Montagne, president of the French Publishers’ Union (SNE), slammed the practice and immediately escalated a legal offensive. The SNE, alongside independent French authors, filed a massive counterfeiting and unfair competition lawsuit against Meta and other AI firms, vowing to fight the exploitation of French literature to the very end. [1]
Copyright Defiance: Under European jurisdiction, mass scanning without direct authorization from copyright holders is considered a clear infringement. French cultural bodies are heavily lobbying the European Union to close any legal loopholes that AI companies might exploit to shield themselves under the guise of “transformative use”. [1, 2, 3, 4]
2. Backlash From Bookshops and Literary Circles
The revelations from “Project Panama”—Anthropic’s internal code name revealing their objective to “destructively scan all the books in the world”—sparked particular outrage within France’s deeply embedded network of independent bookshops (librairies). [1, 2]
Fears of Data Poisoning and Manipulation: French historians, intellectuals, and book enthusiasts have taken to public forums to voice a dystopian anxiety. They argue that taking France’s literary history and locking it behind a private corporate database allows tech behemoths to eventually manipulate, rewrite, or erase original historical and cultural records. [1]
Suspicious Bulk Orders: Independent bookstores across Europe, including adjacent borders, started raising red flags after receiving massive, automated, and erratic online orders for obscure, out-of-print, and academic titles. Sellers expressed horror upon realizing that these books were not destined for preservation, but were being routed to bulk collection points to be stripped, digitized, and fed to machines. [1, 2]
3. Cultural Evocations of “Barbarism”
In the French media and public square, the response has been framed around deep philosophical and historical traumas.
The “Anti-Alexandria” Sentiment: The act of intentionally pulping physical books to feed artificial intelligence has been widely branded by European critics and literature lovers as “a kind of barbarism”. [1]
Fahrenheit 451 Realized: Commentators in the French press have drawn chilling comparisons to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The public consensus points out a dark, modern irony: whereas historical regimes destroyed books to erase human knowledge, Silicon Valley is buying and shredding them to teach machines how to replicate human thought—treating France’s rich literary heritage purely as disposable raw material.AI Overview AI companies are aggressively purchasing and destroying millions of physical books—including vintage, out-of-print, and rare titles by authors like Oscar Wilde—to digitize them for LLM training datasets.
AI Overview When AI companies use a process called destructive scanning, they shred every single physical copy they purchase and scan, which often amounts to millions of individual books and duplicate volumes gathered in bulk.
AI Overview Yes, copies of books by early 20th-century British author Thomas Burke (known for Limehouse Nights)—along with works by thousands of other authors—have been purchased, scanned, and shredded by AI companies.
https://mindmatters.ai/2026/08/its-time-to-buy-old-books-before-ai-destroys-them/
1984 should have been entitled 2026.
Even as I pick up a book of short stories, or a novel – even what used to be called “pulp fiction” – of the mid-20th century in hardback, with nice rough paper; let alone a 19th or 18th century classic with engravings lovingly reproduced in the 1960s, I now see them being sliced and shredded, leaving us digital screen-bound for everything – and I feel sick.
I’m reading now: a simple little 1950s hardback of Cornell Woolrich mystery stories, and this nauseating thought hits me, spoiling my pleasure. I can only say, “This is my book, and they can’t have it before I’m no more, at least.” But then, under capitalism, any man-made disaster can strike, and everything can be lost.
How to enjoy anything? How could I have known, even only thirty years ago, that books, my one go-to that had always been constant, would be threatened?
US seriously considering use of nuclear weapons in Europe – Sputnik.
The 2,000 year old religion of John the Baptist still exists, and its devotees have always hated Christianity.
Even in ancient times the ignorance of the Jews and Christians, their ignorance of nature and natural processes, must have been glaring to the Hellenist Romans and Greeks.
And Adam’s first wife was Lilith, so he’d been going a long time without defecation, since he was already with Eve by the time he got intestines.
” If the Old Testament is fake, the narrative of Jesus, the gospel, the narrative of the apostles, and Revelation is also mythology, and Paul was just a liar.”
It’s mythology anyway. Is there a name for “fake mythology”😀
Was “Paul” a liar, or was he deranged? If Jesus was to him, as some have claimed, a celestial being and not an historical one, then Paul only believed in a celestial Jesus. He does not use the word born, in Jesus’ case, but made, and this distinction is literally maintained by translators up until current ones. Historicity was not created until the Gospel writers, after Paul.
