Anthropic distills humanity's largest knowledge base
New court docs reveal Anthropic's "Project Panama" to destructively scan millions of books for AI training, exposing the industry's hidden data war.
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In early 2024, in a warehouse somewhere in the United States, workers were doing something that looked rather strange: feeding books one by one into a machine, cutting off their spines, scanning them, and then sending the remaining paper off for recycling.
These books had just been purchased — some were brand new. No one would ever read them. Their sole purpose for existing was to be digitally scanned and then destroyed.
The company that ordered this was an AI firm called Anthropic.
In their internal documents, this initiative had a codename: “Project Panama.” A planning document stated: “This is our plan to destructively scan all the books in the world. We don’t want the outside world to know we are doing this.”
But the outside world found out anyway.
Last month, a federal judge unsealed a batch of documents related to a copyright lawsuit — more than 4,000 pages in total. What the public saw was not merely the secrets of one AI company, but the true face of the entire AI industry in its battle for data.
