AI Companies Destructively Scanning Books for Training Data

Anthropic's secret internal initiative, code-named Project Panama, set out to acquire millions of used and rare books and convert them into training data for Claude. In February 2024 the company hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for Google Books, specifically to find a way to obtain 'all the books in the world.' ^[1]Internal planning documents were blunt about the goal: 'Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.' ^[1]The process itself was industrial rather than careful - books were purchased in bulk, fed into a hydraulic-powered cutting machine that sliced off their spines, run through high-speed production scanners page by page, converted into searchable digital files, and the loose paper was then recycled. ^[1]More than 4,000 pages of documents detailing the operation only became public because they were unsealed in the Bartz v. Anthropic copyright lawsuit brought by book authors. ^[2]Anthropic's own planning materials show the company understood how this would look to the public: 'We don't want it to be known that we are working on this.' ^[3]Vendors ultimately proposed converting between 500,000 and 2 million physical books to digital form over a six-month window, and Anthropic spent tens of millions of dollars building out the acquisition-and-scanning pipeline. ^[1]

The reason Project Panama could operate at all traces back to a June 2025 federal ruling. In Bartz v. Anthropic, Judge William Alsup found that training AI on legally purchased books was 'exceedingly transformative' fair use - but he also ruled that acquiring books through piracy, as Anthropic did via LibGen and the Pirate Library Mirror, was not fair use and amounted to willful infringement. ^[4]The distinction that matters for the destruction itself is subtler: Alsup's reasoning treated the physical book's destruction as evidence that the digital copy had 'replaced' rather than duplicated the original, which is part of what made the digitization legally 'transformative.' ^[5]Commentators have since argued that this logic quietly rewards companies for destroying their source material rather than retaining both formats, effectively turning book destruction into a legal safe harbor. ^[7]The ruling is described as having unleashed what one report called an 'unprecedented race' among AI companies to acquire and destroy books at industrial scale. ^[6]The financial stakes of getting the sourcing wrong are real - Anthropic ultimately agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement, the largest known copyright settlement in US history, to resolve claims tied to the pirated portion of its book acquisition. ^[8]

Behind the individual scandal at Anthropic sits a less visible industry: middlemen who source books for AI labs in bulk while keeping the buyers anonymous. ISBNdb, identified by 404 Media, markets bulk sourcing of pre-2022 print books - between 1,000 and 1,000,000 per order - to AI companies, pitching them as guaranteed free of 'AI slop,' the machine-generated text now flooding the open web that risks causing model collapse if ingested during training. ^[9]ISBNdb wraps these deals in strict non-disclosure agreements so that AI buyers' identities, and the scale of what they're destroying, never surface publicly. Even the broker's own messaging acknowledges the reputational stakes: 'the optics problem is real,' since 'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy. ^[9]That anonymized, NDA-protected sourcing pipeline is a large part of why the scale of book destruction across the AI industry stayed hidden for so long, only surfacing through litigation discovery and investigative reporting rather than any company's own disclosure.

Anthropic is the company with its internal memos exposed, but it is far from alone. Authors have separately accused OpenAI and Microsoft of breaching copyright in their own book acquisition for AI training; OpenAI has acknowledged downloading LibGen material but says it deleted the files before ChatGPT's release. ^[10]Google and Meta have also been named among the tech firms that went to significant lengths to obtain large troves of book data for training. ^[11]Google now faces a fresh 2026 lawsuit from major publishers, including Hachette, Cengage, and Elsevier, along with novelist Scott Turow, over its use of books to train Gemini - a case distinct from the 2015 precedent that found Google Books' search-snippet digitization to be fair use. ^[12]Meanwhile librarians, antiquarian booksellers, and cultural preservationists warn that destroying original books - especially rare or unique editions - erases historical artifacts permanently, even when the text itself survives in digital form. ^[13]Whatever the final tally of books destroyed across the industry, this is shaping up as a multi-company legal and cultural reckoning, not a single company's misstep.