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"Project Panama", Anthropic AI's massive book digitization destructively scanned millions of books

Anthropic’s massive book digitization efforts—often referred to internally as "Project Panama" — involved purchasing millions of physical print books and destructively scanning them to train its AI models, including the Anthropic Claude chatbot. [1, 2, 3]
Court documents and investigations have revealed exactly how the company went about this process:

• The Process: Anthropic bought physical copies of books in bulk (often used books). They then used high-speed hydraulic machines to slice off the book spines and scanned the loose pages at lightning-fast speeds.
• Disposal: Once the pages were digitized into PDFs with machine-readable text, the original physical paper copies were discarded and recycled.
• Legal Rulings: In a major 2025 copyright lawsuit (Bartz v. Anthropic), a federal judge ruled that the company's destructive format-shifting was considered "transformative fair use" because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first and used the text to teach its AI to write, rather than to replicate the books for human consumption.
• The "Shadow Library" Conflict: While the purchased, destructively scanned books were deemed legally permissible format-shifting by the judge, Anthropic also illegally downloaded millions of digital books from pirate sites (like LibGen) to build its training library. This ultimately led to Anthropic agreeing to a historic $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers. [6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]

If a person is looking to digitize personal books for personal study or research, it can be accomplished without destroying them by using mobile apps like Adobe Scan or dedicated physical book scanners.

AI response

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/