A 2025 court document revealed that the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has made regular practice of purchasing books, removing their bindings, scanning the content to a digital library, and then destroying the original physical copy.
“Project Panama” by Anthropic is the name of the company’s mission to obtain “all the books in the world” and maintain a digital library in perpetuam, according to The Epoch Times.
These and other details regarding the project have been revealed since the unsealing of court documents from the Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit, which also found that Anthropic is purchasing the books from several vendors, including major retailers like Better World Books and World of Books.
An Anthropic spokesperson claimed they never destroy “rare or antiquarian books,” but the practice is nonetheless drawing criticism and concern.
Book collectors, for one, argue that cultural artifacts are destroyed even though the words of a book are retained. Another element raising eyebrows is that when a company purchases a large order of books, there is often no way of knowing if their purpose is to put the works into this AI pipeline, resulting in their destruction.
Book sellers who run shops specializing in older, rarer books are paying more attention to orders that appear suspicious. “The orders frequently involved older or obscure books and often books published pre-2022. Such books are valuable for training large language models because they’re sure to be free of AI-generated text,” The Epoch Times reports.
As public outrage began spreading on social media after the revelation of “Project Panama” type missions, notable figures like Elon Musk have spoken out saying they will not pursue book destruction in the name of AI. “I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way [versus] just cutting off the spine and scanning,” he wrote on X last month.
The AI-book pipeline is also drawing the reaction from many that the practice is Orwellian in nature, with concern about the ability to trust that original text has not been manipulated or altered without having an original copy readily available to check against.
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