Overview
- Internal documents disclosed in court show an April 13, 2024 memorandum naming Project Panama and describing a plan to build a central digital library by buying and destructively scanning print books for model training.
- Court filings and testimony detail operations in which vendors stripped bindings, cut pages, scanned books into machine‑readable PDFs, and discarded the paper originals rather than returning them to libraries or sellers.
- Judge William Alsup found on the record that converting lawfully purchased print copies to digital format did not prove infringement of an author’s expressive style, while separate evidence of pirated digital books led Anthropic to reach about a $1.5 billion settlement.
- Investigations have identified brokers and resellers such as ISBNdb and Zoom Books as intermediaries that supplied bulk lists of older titles for scanning and prompted vendors to remove disputed marketing as scrutiny widened.
- Publishers, booksellers, and librarians have condemned the destructive workflow and are pushing for non‑destructive digitization standards and clearer rules that could spur industry changes or regulatory attention.