Anthropic copyright litigation and Project Panama scandal
The developments in this story so far, most recent first.
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Why is Anthropic destroying books? | Kathryn James
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Court documents revealing details of Project Panama were unsealed.
Court documents unsealed in late July revealed details regarding Project Panama, an effort initiated by Anthropic in early 2024. According to internal memos, the project involved an attempt to destructively scan all the books in the world to train the company's large language model, Claude.
The codename 'Project Panama' was reportedly used because the company did not want its work on destructive book scanning to be known. While the original printed books were discarded after being scanned, there was no evidence that the digital copies were shown, shared, or sold outside of Anthropic.
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A landmark court ruling regarding the use of books for LLM training.
In June 2025, a landmark court ruling established that using lawfully purchased books to train a large language model is considered fair use under US copyright law. While the court distinguished between these legal purchases and materials acquired through piracy, the ruling regarding the legality of training on purchased works remained intact.
According to Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, the legal distinction centered on how materials were acquired rather than the permission to develop AI technology itself. The ruling provided a legal precedent for the use of books, even as the company faced separate settlements regarding the use of pirated content.
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Project Panama was initiated.
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A group of authors filed a class action lawsuit against Anthropic.
In 2024, a group of authors, led by novelist Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, initiated a class action lawsuit against Anthropic.
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Ben Mann downloaded pirated books from LibGen and shared links with employees.
In June 2021, Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann reportedly downloaded pirated books from LibGen and shared a link to the Pirate Library Mirror with employees.
This occurred as Anthropic initially used pirated books from sources such as LibGen and the Pirate Library Mirror to train its Claude model.