WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - 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 competition among AI companies to secure high-quality training data. Anthropic reportedly considered books especially valuable because they can help models learn to write better than training data pulled from the open internet.
The revelations come amid increasing legal scrutiny over whether and how copyrighted books can be used to train AI systems, with key questions about the boundaries of AI training data still being decided in U.S. courts.
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