The quest to ‘destructively scan’ all the world’s books
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. It was code-named Project Panama, and internal documents filed in court described it as an “effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”
According to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off potentially millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed knowledge into the AI models behind products such as Claude, its popular chatbot. A judge ruled this fair use.
Details of Project Panama emerged in more than 4,000 pages of documents in a copyright lawsuit brought by book authors against Anthropic. The company agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the case in August – but a district judge’s decision last week to unseal a slew of documents in the case more fully revealed Anthropic’s zealous pursuit of books.
Today on “Post Reports,” technology reporter Will Oremus explains the lengths to which AI firms such as Anthropic, Meta, Google and OpenAI went to obtain colossal troves of data with which to “train” their software – a frantic and sometimes clandestine race to acquire the collected works of humanity.
He and host Martine Powers discuss how AI companies’ efforts sometimes might have crossed over into the illegal, and how authors and artists might fare in an AI-centered future.
Today’s show was produced by Rennie Svirnovskiy. It was edited by Dennis Funk and mixed by Sam Bair.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So you might have heard of the AI startup called Anthropic. |
| 0:05.3 | This is the company behind the AI chatbot Claude. |
| 0:09.5 | Well, in 2024, executives at Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project that they'd hoped to keep quiet. |
| 0:17.4 | It was codenamed Project Panama, and internal planning documents recently unsealed in legal filings |
| 0:24.5 | described it as their, quote, effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. |
| 0:33.4 | Project Panama was Anthropics' ambitious project to buy as many books as it possibly could. |
| 0:39.7 | It would take them to a scanning center. It would slice off the spines, scan every page one by one, |
| 0:45.8 | feed it into this digital library that thought if it could get all the pros from all the books in the world, |
| 0:52.5 | that it would be able to build the best AI chatbot of all. |
| 0:56.2 | This week, technology reporter Will Aramis first reported on Project Panama's details exposed in these legal filings. |
| 1:04.1 | It was really evocative that this company was literally destroying hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of books. |
| 1:11.2 | Because that's sort of what creatives are worried about, right? |
| 1:14.1 | Like the destruction and the aggregation of their work into these gargantuan AI systems |
| 1:20.1 | that are going to hoover up all the knowledge in the world. |
| 1:23.0 | It was just sort of like a physical manifestation of that concern. |
| 1:28.8 | Initial details about Anthropics' hunger for books |
| 1:32.4 | emerged in documents filed in a copyright lawsuit. |
| 1:35.9 | That lawsuit was brought by book authors against the AI startup in 2023. |
| 1:40.7 | It was settled in August for more than a billion dollars. |
| 1:44.1 | But documents from the case also show something else, |
| 1:47.0 | that the company may have crossed legal lines |
| 1:50.0 | while pursuing all the world's pros. |
... |
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