# AI companies destroy physical books for data training, says Lawrence Liang 2026-08-16T15:04:08+00:00 | Technology | Indian Opinion Desk Corroboration: 1 independent outlet Lawrence Liang, writing for National Herald India, draws a stark parallel between the Nazi book burnings and the current practice of AI companies like Anthropic destroying physical books to train large language models. He describes how industrial blades guillotine book spines, and pages are scanned before the remains are shredded. Unlike past purges driven by political ideology, this destruction is done in the name of knowledge production, treating books as mere containers of raw data. Liang notes the irony that, in early print history, binders destroyed old manuscripts for their parchment, discarding the text. He argues that replacing human readers with memory machines reverses the hope in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, where people preserved books by memory. While digitisation itself is not bad, Liang questions the methods of multibillion-dollar companies that choose destructive scanning for speed and cost. He also raises the uncomfortable question of ordinary complicity in the age of AI. ## Coverage - nationalheraldindia.com This story was synthesised by AI from the source linked above. Tags: Anthropic, Lawrence Liang, National Herald India Canonical: https://indianopinion.org/ai-companies-destroy-physical-books-for-data-training-says-lawrence-liang/ License: Summary and commentary (c) Indian Opinion, reusable with attribution. Facts belong to the linked sources. Cite: https://indianopinion.org/ai-companies-destroy-physical-books-for-data-training-says-lawrence-liang/#story-in-brief Review state: restored archive article, accurate at time of publication, not offered to search indexes. How this brief was made: an AI model read the report linked above and wrote this summary and analysis, which were published automatically. Published briefs are sampled every hour by an automated quality check; the editor verifies its findings and approves corrections, and corrected briefs carry a dated correction line. We do no original reporting. Methodology: https://indianopinion.org/ai-use-policy/