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Anthropicâs Master and Confidential Move
The artificial intelligence company Anthropic bought and destroyed millions of physical books through a secret project to train its Claude language model. This revelation became public due to court documents from the Bartz v. Anthropic copyright case.
Internally, Anthropic referred to this initiative as Project Panama. Its explicit purpose was âto destructively scan all the books in the world.â The use of a code name was due to the fact that they wanted discretion and to avoid public scrutiny.
The companies contracted by the tech firm carried out a âdestructive scan.â They used hydraulic cutting machines to slice the spines of the books. With the loose pages, they quickly digitized them on high-output scanners and then sent the paper remains to recycling companies.
Todayâs internet is flooded with AI-generated content, which degrades new models if theyâre trained on it (a phenomenon called âmodel collapseâ). Old printed books offer clean, human-written prose with high structural quality.
The legal strategy: Anthropic was already facing multimillion-dollar lawsuits for using pirated digital copies from the internet. Its strategy to defend itself under the âFair Useâ doctrine in the U.S. was to buy legitimate physical books. By digitizing them and destroying the original, they argued that they were not âduplicatingâ the book market, but simply transforming the format of a product they had already paid for. A federal judge validated this technical argument about the purchased books.
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Anthropicâs Master and Confidential Move
The artificial intelligence company Anthropic bought and destroyed millions of physical books through a secret project to train its Claude language model. This revelation became public due to court documents from the Bartz v. Anthropic copyright case.
Internally, Anthropic referred to this initiative as Project Panama. Its explicit purpose was âto destructively scan all the books in the world.â The use of a code name was due to the fact that they wanted discretion and to avoid public scrutiny.
The companies contracted by the tech firm carried out a âdestructive scan.â They used hydraulic cutting machines to slice the spines of the books. With the loose pages, they quickly digitized them on high-output scanners and then sent the paper remains to recycling companies.
Todayâs internet is flooded with AI-generated content, which degrades new models if theyâre trained on it (a phenomenon called âmodel collapseâ). Old printed books offer clean, human-written prose with high structural quality.
The legal strategy: Anthropic was already facing multimillion-dollar lawsuits for using pirated digital copies from the internet. Its strategy to defend itself under the âFair Useâ doctrine in the U.S. was to buy legitimate physical books. By digitizing them and destroying the original, they argued that they were not âduplicatingâ the book market, but simply transforming the format of a product they had already paid for. A federal judge validated this technical argument about the purchased books.
$HOME $CVX $CRV