404 Media recently discovered that ISBNdb is bulk purchasing used books for AI companies — up to millions per order — and using nondisclosure agreements to hide the buyer's identity. The report didn't name Anthropic, but it quickly revived scrutiny of the company's "Project Panama": buying books, cutting off their spines, scanning them at high speed, and sending the originals to recycling.
Anthropic had bought millions of physical books, sliced off their spines to feed them through a scanner, then recycled the remains. Internal documents stated the company didn't want outsiders to know about the project.
The hardest part for many is that rare and out-of-print books could also end up on this assembly line. Regular books can be reprinted, but limited editions — once destroyed — are gone forever. Courts have previously ruled that scanning legally purchased books and destroying the originals can be considered fair use, but legal doesn't mean uncontested.
Elon Musk subsequently said he has instructed SpaceXAI to preserve rare books and scan them without destroying the originals.
White House AI and crypto advisor David Sacks criticized Anthropic for hypocrisy: it argues it can freely use the world's works to train models, yet calls it intellectual property theft when competitors pay for Claude's outputs to train their own models.