Anthropic Destructively Scanned Books for Claude Training in Project Panama as Court Upheld Fair Use
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Aug 5
Anthropic Destructively Scanned Books for Claude Training in Project Panama as Court Upheld Fair Use
3 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Aug 5
Summary
Internal court exhibits in Bartz v Anthropic show the company launched “Project Panama” to buy physical books, cut off their bindings, scan them into digital files and discard the originals for Claude training.
Anthropic pursued the effort to build a large pre-2022, high-quality text dataset while avoiding what its CEO called the copyright “legal/practice/business slog” of licensing e-books.
The documents place the scanning push after Anthropic had already used pirated books, a path that fed into a $1.5 billion settlement with authors before the company shifted to purchased print copies.
Judge William Alsup ruled the destructive scanning was lawful fair use because the print copies were transformed into internal digital replacements that were not shown, shared or sold outside the company.
The case highlights a broader opening for AI firms: US law appears to permit large-scale destruction of purchased books for model training, with little specific protection for books as cultural objects.