Anthropic's secret book scanning project revealed in court documents
Anthropic, an AI company, secretly ran "Project Panama," aiming to scan as many books as possible—even if it meant destroying them.
They spent millions buying used books in bulk from secondhand sellers and kept the whole thing quiet until court documents were unsealed (reported in February 2026).
The lengths they went to keep it under wraps
Shaped in part by a former Google Books exec, the team used machines to slice off book spines and quickly scan every page before recycling what was left.
Internal messages made it clear: "We don't want it to be known that we are working on this."
The secrecy only fueled more questions once everything came out.
The legal mess that followed
Things got even messier when news surfaced that Anthropic's co-founder had previously downloaded pirated books.
The project sparked heated debates about copyright and AI.
A federal judge later ruled that training on books can qualify as fair use.
Soon after, Anthropic settled with authors for $1.5 billion—without admitting they did anything wrong—highlighting just how complicated copyright is getting in the AI era.