Artificial intelligence companies have been buying millions of printed books, cutting off the spines with industrial cutters, scanning the loose pages, and destroying what remains to train their chatbots, court records show.
The practice surfaced through Bartz v Anthropic, the copyright class action that ended in a $1.5B (£1.1B) settlement. Unsealed documents described a secret programme Anthropic called Project Panama, summed up in one internal memo from April 2024: 'Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.' The same memo noted the team used a 'soft codename', because it did not want the work known outside the company. To run it, Anthropic brought in Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for Google Books.
