Image: 21st century book burning (shredding) for AI
I can’t believe I’m writing this, but here goes. Earlier this year The Washington Post (read article here, unfortunately paywalled, summaries here and here) wrote an article detailing how Anthropic was training its AI ‘Claude’ LLM by not simply sucking up pirated ebooks from the internet through sites like LibGen, but they’ve been buying physical second-hand copies of books, scanning the text and then shredding the books (millions of them). In the process, they’re taking these books completely out of the marketplace, including out-of-print and rare foreign language texts, which once shredded, are gone for good. Anthropic called this atrocity Project Panama (started in 2024), well aware that it could be a PR nightmare, as authors had successfully sued them in the United States for copying their pirated ebooks without any monetary or copyright considerations, for 1.5 billion dollars (settled in August 2025).
The court case Bartz v. Anthropic, presided over by Judge William Alsup, determined that Anthropic’s use of second-hand books was considered ‘fair use’ under U.S. copyright law. Anthropic basically exploited a legal concept known as ‘first-sale doctrine’, which allows buyers to do what they want with their purchase without a copyright holder interfering. Judge Alsup determined that Anthropic’s scanning of legally bought books for training AI through digital copies, was not in the same league as creating new digital and physical copies of the original for further redistribution and sale, therefore it fell under the practice of ‘fair use’.
Yet another example of Silicon Valley tech overlords and their incredible lack of consideration for ethics, creativity, culture, intellectual property, the authors’ work, and also, readers. And in the end, the so-called ‘writing’ produced by AI will always be slop, by the very fact of how it is generated in the first place. Anthropic’s actions are destructive, not creative, and the fact they believe they can mimic writing through these methods says everything about how little they know about how to write or create at all.