AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anthropic's "Project Panama" was exposed in a $1.5 billion copyright settlement. In early 2024, they launched this highly confidential project, spending tens of millions of dollars purchasing millions of paper books, scanning them, training its LLM, and then destroying them all.

This is legally permissible but ethically a crime against humanity. Destroying books prevents competitors from scanning them, avoids legal risks, and is cheaper than lossless scanning. After AI companies massively scan and destroy physical books, they become the only ones with digital copies. Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers.

Anna's Archive, the world's largest shadow library, calls for volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears. If every person scans a book, and there are 10 million volunteers worldwide, we can obtain 10 million pieces of invaluable wealth. Since 2025, AI-generated content accounts for more than half of newly published internet content.

Once AI has absorbed even the last sentence written by humans on paper, all that remains will be AI's own words. Shadow libraries offer the best answer to preserve human civilization. This is a race against time to scan all the world's publications before publishers block knowledge and AI companies destroy all books.