India, July 31 -- Newly unsealed court filings show that AI startup Anthropic bought millions of physical books, removed their spines, scanned every page, and recycled what was left as part of an internal effort to create training data for its Claude AI models.
The project internally called "Project Panama" was described in company documents as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world." According to the filings, Anthropic spent tens of millions of dollars buying books from used-book sellers before dismantling and digitizing them. Internal planning materials also reportedly noted, "We don't want it to be known that we are working on this."
The disclosures, which surfaced in a copyright lawsuit, underscore the intense com...