"Anthropic shredded millions of physical books to train its Claude AI model - and new documents suggest that it was well aware of just how bad it would look if anyone found out. The secret initiative, called Project Panama, was unearthed last summer in a lawsuit brought by a group of authors against Anthropic, which the company eventually agreed to settle for $1.5 billion in August."
"Buying, scanning, and then destroying millions of used books was one way of doing this, and it had the advantage of both being cheap and very possibly legal. The destructive practice exploited a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows buyers to do what they want with their purchase without a copyright holder interfering. (This is what allows the secondhand media market to exist.)"
"The documents revealed how Anthropic leadership viewed books as "essential" to training its AI models, with one co-founder stating it would teach the bots "how to write well" instead of mimicking "low quality internet speak." It used a "hydraulic powered cutting machine" to "neatly cut" the millions of books it got from used book retailers, and then scanned the pages "on high speed, high quality, production level scanners.""
Anthropic purchased millions of used physical books, had them cut, scanned, and recycled to create digital training data for its Claude AI models under Project Panama. Leadership considered books essential to teach models how to write well rather than mimic low-quality internet speech. The operation used hydraulic-powered cutting machines to neatly cut books and production-level scanners to digitize pages. The company relied on first-sale doctrine to legally destroy purchased books, and a judge later found the digitization contributed to transformative use, enabling a fair-use defense and allowing Anthropic to avoid paying authors for those works.
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