The Guardian · US news · Original story
Why is Anthropic destroying books? | Kathryn James
The AI company apparently found destructively scanning ‘all the books in the world’ easier than dealing with copyright in its quest for training data
Should we destroy all the books in the world?
An answer to this question can be found in the court documents of Bartz v Anthropic PBC. The northern California district court case, decided in late July this year, highlighted the improbably named “Project Panama”, one of the AI company Anthropic’s efforts to improve its large language model Claude. “What is Project Panama?” court exhibit 21 asks, in an internal memo. The answer: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The memo advises discretion: “Why use a codename? … [B]ecause we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
Continue reading...
Kathryn James · Wed, Aug 5, 2026, 4:00 AM
US news | The Guardian
The AI company apparently found destructively scanning ‘all the books in the world’ easier than dealing with copyright in its quest for training data
Should we destroy all the books in the world?
An answer to this question can be found in the court documents of Bartz v Anthropic PBC. The northern California district court case, decided in late July this year, highlighted the improbably named “Project Panama”, one of the AI company Anthropic’s efforts to improve its large language model Claude. “What is Project Panama?” court exhibit 21 asks, in an internal memo. The answer: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The memo advises discretion: “Why use a codename? … [B]ecause we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
Continue reading...This page shows an excerpt; reporting belongs to the original publisher. Some images or embeds may be omitted compared with the live article.
← More stories · Front page
