Washington Post: “Inside an AI Start-Up’s Plan to Scan and Dispose of Millions of Books”

From the Article:

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot, Claude.

Details of Project Panama, which have not been previously reported, emerged in more than 4,000 pages of documents in a copyright lawsuit brought by book authors against Anthropic, which has been valued by investors at $183 billion. 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.

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When Anthropic embarked on its Project Panama operation to buy and scan physical books, it turned to a Silicon Valley veteran. The company hired Tom Turvey, a Google executive who had helped to create the search giant’s famous but legally contested Google Books project two decades earlier.

Anthropic initially considered buying books from libraries or used bookstores like New York City landmark the Strand, known for its “18 miles” of new and used books, according to the filings. The store was “interested in providing used books,” according to a document detailing a March 2024 Anthropic content acquisition meeting.

Anthropic employees also discussed approaching U.S. libraries including the New York Public Library or “a new library that is chronically underfunded,” according to the documents.

It’s not clear which, if any, of the proposals Anthropic implemented. Reached via email, a spokesperson for the Strand said the book shop did not end up selling any books to Anthropic. NYPL did not respond to a request for comment.

Anthropic eventually bought millions of books, often in batches of tens of thousands, according to the filings. It relied on booksellers including used book retailers Better World Books and U.K.-based World of Books.

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