Documents released in a pending US court case show how Anthropic, the company developing Claude, secretly bought, destroyed and scanned books to train its chatbot.
According to Euronews, in warehouses in the United States, the cards were cut, scanned and digitally transformed to train AI models, after which they were sent for recycling and turned into products such as toilet paper or cardboard boxes.
The Panama Project was Anthropic’s confidential plan to a “destructively scan all the books in the world”according to an internal document made public in late July as part of the lawsuit.
“We don’t want it to be known that we’re working on it”the document states.
The revelation of these practices, first reported by The Washington Post, has fueled new controversies over the race to develop artificial intelligence and provided one of the clearest pictures yet of how one of the biggest AI companies relates to the work of authors, artists, photographers and other content creators.
The Panama Project began in 2024, when Anthropic management was looking for older books that were not available online to teach the chatbot Claude “how to write well”instead of imitating “poor internet language”, according to the documents.
The company bought tens of thousands of books at a time from several distributors, including Better World Books and World of Books in the UK.
Later, Anthropic outsourced the scanning and shredding process to a specialist supplier, who used hydraulic presses to cut the spines and separate the pages one by one so they could be quickly scanned with industrial equipment.
According to a vendor who worked with Anthropic, the company was looking for a provider capable of converting between 500,000 and two million books in just six months.
According to internal documents, Anthropic turned to books because it believed they offered higher quality content than what was available on the Internet and reduced the risk of degrading the performance of AI models.
The documents also suggest that some company executives used pirated libraries, such as LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror, to obtain copyrighted books.
The Panama Project became public only after thousands of pages of documents were declassified in a copyright infringement lawsuit.
A group of writers, led by novelist Andrea Bartz and writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, filed a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the company of violating copyright laws by using pirated books.
Last month, Anthropic, now valued at $965 billion, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the dispute, with damages to cover about 500,000 eligible works.
“This is the largest copyright infringement settlement known to date”said Justin Nelson, lead attorney for the authors.
This is the first major copyright lawsuit against an AI company to result in a settlement, but Meta, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft face similar allegations.
The US court ruled that the use of legally purchased books could be considered fair use, protected by US copyright law, but distinguished between them and the millions of books that Anthropic allegedly obtained through piracy.
According to the company, the agreement only covered how to obtain the materials, not the right to use them to train AI models.
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