By Ben Soltau
In a quest to bring their large language model Claude to greater heights, the American artificial intelligence company Anthropic has been destructively scanning millions of books in a venture known as Project Panama.
This process, called unbinding, involves Anthropic purchasing millions of books globally, severing their spines with hydraulic splicers, and running the pages through high-speed scanners before pulping the remains.
While unbinding is a common practice for digitising old books, the use of books to train AI has sparked debate worldwide in wake of other companies, such as Zoom Books in Canada, following in Anthropic’s footsteps.
“The destruction of books to train AI is dystopian,” said a member of Socialist Alliance’s Resistance Bookshop in Sydney.
Further details have recently been unearthed in court documents released from the class action lawsuit, Bartz v Anthropic PBC, which accuses Anthropic of copyright breach in the training of their LLM.
“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” a memo revealed in Exhibit 21 of the lawsuit said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
The case was originally formed in August 2024 by three authors accusing Anthropic of downloading millions of copyrighted books from piracy sites for training their AI, along with millions of physical books that were bought and destructively scanned for the same purpose.
In June of 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled that the use of the books for AI training was transformative and protected as fair use, though the pirating of books was labelled infringement.
Two months later in August 2025, Judge Alsup certified the case as a class action involving all others possessing the reproduction rights of nearly half a million works. Anthropic was looking at a possible liability of over $70 billion, the company settled in September for $1.5 billion.
“I love old books. I love the feel of them, the look of them. I would sooner have a wall covered by a bookcase full of beautiful old books than a wall with artworks,” said Paul J Feain, director of Sydney Rare Book Auctions and owner of the Cornstalk Bookshop.
“I can see the day coming when books will not be published in paper book form at all.
“Most old books destroy themselves with age, insects, rodents, fire, flood, water, war, and disinterest. I have destroyed and thrown out thousands of books in my life as a bookseller. I do not have the time or the money or the space to keep every old book which is unsaleable.
“I do feel strongly about preserving the information contained in books. Human advancement and civilization need this information.”
Featured image: AI’s insatiable appetite for training material has given us the modern equivalent of book burning. Photo: LearningLark/CC/flickr
