Anthropic's 'Project Panama' Bulk-Buys Books for AI Training
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- Independent booksellers worldwide are seeing unusual bulk orders — Stuart Manley of Barter Books in Northumberland received a single Canadian order equalling a typical week's sales, something he says he has "never seen" in 30 years.
- A 2025 US court ruling found Anthropic's use of authors' books to train Claude was "exceedingly transformative" and not a copyright violation, fueling suspicion that the bulk purchases are destined for AI training data.
- Unsealed court documents revealed Anthropic referred internally to its book ingestion initiative as "Project Panama" with the stated aim to "destructively scan all the books in the world," a process that removes spines to digitize pages rapidly and recycles the remains.
- Anthropic said it does not buy and destroy "rare or antiquarian books" specifically and insisted sourcing books for training is standard across the AI industry, though it declined to detail the program's final destinations.
- Derek Walker, owner of Edinburgh bookshop McNaughtan's, flagged the ethical tension — sales of obscure Latin texts or cowboy novels may be acceptable losses, but the destruction of the only known surviving example of an 18th-century edition would be "a much more significant problem."
- Professor Emily Hudson, an intellectual property specialist at Oxford, said UK copyright law differs sharply from the US ruling, with copying for training libraries requiring the copyright owner's permission by default.
Why it matters: Booksellers who profit from the bulk-buying boom openly admit they cannot verify where the books end up — and the unsealed Project Panama documents show Anthropic aimed to "destructively scan all the books in the world," meaning rare surviving editions could be pulped for AI training under a US legal standard that doesn't apply in the UK.
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