- AI companies like Anthropic are buying millions of old books to scan and then destroy them for training large language models.
- Anthropic's Project Panama used hydraulic cutting machines to remove book spines and slice pages for industrial scanning before discarding.
- Internal documents reveal Anthropic wanted to keep the project secret, acknowledging negative public reception.
- A judge approved a $1.5 billion class action payment for pirated works, but physical book scanning was ruled fair use under the first-sale doctrine.