What happened

In a project internally referred to as “Project Panama,” Anthropic purchased large quantities of physical books and then cut them apart to scan every page into digital form for use as training data for its Claude AI models. The physical volumes were then discarded, effectively destroying the books.

Documents from a copyright lawsuit indicate millions of books were processed this way. The approach has been described as an industrial-scale application of a scanning method that destroys the originals after digitising them.

The resulting training process fueled ongoing legal action from authors and creators, who argue they were not compensated or asked for consent despite their works being used in this manner.

Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann reportedly personally approved the download of millions of books from "shadow libraries" such as LibGen, The Pile, and YouTube Subtitles to kickstart training.

Why it happened

The root cause is the industry-wide hunger for high-quality, "long-form" data, which is essential for teaching AI models logic and nuance. 

While Anthropic markets itself as an "AI Safety" company, it is clear it quietly prioritised rapid scaling over copyright compliance and slidelines corporate accountability in favour of the "move fast" mentality prevalent in the AI arms race.

It is hardly alone. AI companies rarely disclose the specific datasets used for training, and the "black box" nature of these models makes it difficult for authors to prove their specific work was used until independent researchers or legal discovery processes unearth the truth.