Anthropic spent tens of millions of dollars secretly buying, scanning and destroying millions of physical books to train its Claude chatbot, according to more than 4,000 pages of unsealed court documents reviewed by the Washington Post.
The operation, internally named 'Project Panama', ran from early 2024 and involved hydraulic cutting machines slicing the spines off books before high-speed scanners digitised every page. The paper was then recycled, leaving no physical copy behind.
