Project Panama: The AI Industry's Quiet War on Physical Books

Court filings and a new wave of investigations reveal how the race for AI training data is turning physical books into machine-readable intelligence — and raising a bigger question for Africa: who owns the knowledge that AI learns from?

There is a particular kind of violence in cutting a book's spine off. Archivists, rare-book dealers and authors have spent months confronting an unsettling reality: some of the world's most advanced artificial-intelligence systems have been built not only from websites and digital databases, but from physical books purchased, dismantled and scanned at industrial scale.