How many AIs does it take to read a PDF?

The Verge

February 23, 2026

AI-Generated Deep Dive Summary

Last November, as the House Oversight Committee released 20,000 pages of documents from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, Luke Igel and his friends faced a challenge: navigating garbled email threads and an outdated PDF viewer. The Department of Justice soon followed with over three million more files, all in PDF format. While OCR (optical character recognition) was applied to the text, it proved ineffective, making the documents nearly unsearchable. This issue highlights the limitations of traditional PDF formats and raises questions about how technology can better handle large-scale document releases. The problem stems from the way government agencies process and share files. Despite running OCR on text, the quality often falls short, leaving users with poor search functionality. Igel and his team found themselves manually sifting through documents, a tedious task when dealing with millions of pages. This inefficiency underscores the broader struggle with accessing public records in a usable format. For tech-savvy readers, this issue matters because it points to gaps in document accessibility and digital tools. While PDFs remain a standard format, they often lack features that make large datasets searchable and user-friendly. The challenge faced by Igel and others highlights the need for better OCR technology and more accessible interfaces for handling public records. As agencies continue to release vast amounts of information, improving how these documents are processed and shared becomes critical for transparency and accountability. In the future, advancements in AI-powered tools could help convert scanned PDFs into searchable formats, making it easier for researchers, journalists, and citizens to access and analyze important information. This development would not only save time but also enhance the overall efficiency of working with digital documents. For now, the struggle with unsearchable PDFs serves as a reminder of how much work remains in creating truly accessible digital records.

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Originally published on The Verge on 2/23/2026