Court documents unsealed this summer confirmed that Anthropic ran an internal program, code-named Project Panama, to buy millions of physical books, strip their spines with cutting machines, scan the pages to train Claude, and discard the paper originals. A viral video and social posts revived the story this week, though separating what’s actually documented from what’s since been exaggerated online takes some care.
Quick facts
- Court records confirm Anthropic bought millions of physical books, often in bulk from resellers like Better World Books and World of Books, then destructively scanned and discarded them.
- A federal judge ruled that this specific practice, converting legally purchased physical books into internal digital copies, is protected as “transformative” fair use.
- That ruling is separate from Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement over a different allegation: training on pirated digital books obtained without purchase, the largest copyright settlement in US history.
- An internal document reportedly stated the team didn’t want the project’s existence known; the total number of books destroyed and the total cost remain redacted.
- Elon Musk publicly criticized the practice on X on July 27, and investor Michael Burry called it “evil incarnate.”
What the court documents actually show
Per a detailed review of the underlying evidence, the court’s summary-judgment order describes an employee tasked with obtaining “all the books in the world” for what internal documents called a research library. After limited outreach to publishers about licensing, the team turned to distributors and retailers for bulk purchases, sometimes tens of thousands of books at a time, then paid service providers to strip the bindings, cut the pages, and scan them with industrial imaging equipment before discarding the originals.
The judge’s ruling on this specific practice found in Anthropic’s favor: converting a purchased physical book into an internal digital copy, one-for-one, was deemed transformative fair use. That’s a meaningfully different legal question than the one behind Anthropic’s separate $1.5 billion settlement, which covered a different practice entirely: training on pirated digital books the company never purchased at all. Conflating the two, as much of the viral online discussion has, misrepresents what was actually found illegal versus what a court explicitly permitted.
Where the viral version overshoots the documented facts
Fact-checking coverage from Snopes draws an important distinction the broader viral narrative tends to blur: the confirmed, documented facts belong specifically to Anthropic’s Project Panama. A separate, newer claim, that a wider, mostly anonymous market of AI companies is secretly bulk-buying and destroying books through brokers like ISBNdb, comes from a July 21 investigation by 404 Media and remains far less conclusive, since the identities and practices of those other buyers aren’t established with the same documentary evidence as Anthropic’s case. The rare-book-targeting claim specifically is also less certain than viral posts suggest; the underlying evidence shows outreach mentioning “less common books,” not a confirmed, systematic targeting of scarce or historically significant volumes.
Why the comparison to Google Books keeps coming up
The recurring criticism in public discussion isn’t really about whether scanning books to train AI is permissible, courts have now weighed in on versions of that question, it’s about method. Google Books and the Internet Archive have run comparably massive book-scanning projects for years using non-destructive equipment that preserves the original physical copy. Anthropic’s approach, physically destroying each book after scanning it, was reportedly a deliberate choice: the Washington Post has reported Anthropic favored print books partly because they’re better-written and free of the low-quality text that pervades scraped web content, and destructive scanning is faster and cheaper at scale than preservation-grade digitization.
Key takeaway
The core, court-documented fact, Anthropic destructively scanned millions of purchased physical books and a judge ruled that practice legal, is genuinely significant and worth understanding on its own terms. But the version circulating most widely online has folded in a separate, less-substantiated claim about a broader industry-wide secret book-destruction market. Both deserve to be evaluated on the actual evidence behind each, not treated as a single, undifferentiated scandal.
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