Recently, a post on the X platform has garnered considerable attention. The blogger, Sivori, alleged that the AI firm Anthropic is procuring millions of books, scanning them, and subsequently destroying them, asserting that this method is the most legally defensible. This scenario bears a striking resemblance to the 'Librareome Project' depicted in Vernor Vinge's 2006 science fiction novel Rainbows End, where libraries digitize their collections in a destructive manner and then dispose of the physical copies.
Upon further investigation, it was confirmed that Anthropic's 'Panama Project' is indeed a reality. Court documents disclose that since 2024, the company has enlisted Tom Turvey, the former leader of the Google Books project, to acquire substantial quantities of second-hand books, dismantle and scan them, and then forward the remnants to recycling firms. The judge deemed this to constitute fair use, based on the 'first sale doctrine'—which stipulates that legally purchased physical books can be disposed of at will, and that the scanned files are utilized solely internally and not distributed externally.
However, it should be noted that Anthropic had previously sourced books from the piracy website LibGen to train its models, resulting in a $1.5 billion settlement agreement in 2025, marking one of the highest-value settlements in the realm of AI copyright. Despite the current ambiguity in laws regarding the fair use of AI training, Anthropic's 'purchase-scan-destroy' model has ignited protests from writers and publishers. They contend that it infringes upon copyright and that the books being processed are predominantly common second-hand books with high circulation, rather than rare ancient books possessing cultural significance.