Internal Docs Discovered in Lawsuit Exposed Anthropic’s Mass Book Shredding Project

It turns out that Anthropic—the giant AI company behind the Claude chatbot—has been secretly destroying millions of books in the process of feeding them into the AI system. Slicing off the spines. Cutting the pages. Scanning them. And then discarding the remains.

All to avoid paying copyright fees to the creators.

The initiative was called Project Panama—and it was supposed to be a secret. We only learned about it through luck, basically—it was made public only because of the discovery process in an unrelated lawsuit.

And the kicker is that it’s 100 percent legal. Furthermore, ironically, it’s only legal, because Anthropic destroys the books in the process of scanning them.