The ruling cites the First-Sale Doctrine to justify destroying physical books and reveals Anthropic’s secret project 'Panama,' which aims to destructively scan books to create data sets or 'shadow libraries' for AI training.

Investigative reporting followed a surge of bulk orders for thousands of books by secondhand and independent booksellers across the USA, UK, and Europe.

404 Media notes that the books are selected by ISBN and may post-date 1970, meaning some items could be rare or antiquarian, while access to private digital records complicates public knowledge of the losses.

The piece contrasts this practice with historic digitization efforts like Google Books, arguing that major tech firms prioritize efficiency and profit over preservation and open access to knowledge.

404 Media embedded a tracker in a box of antiquarian books and traced shipments to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, where books are reportedly shredded and scanned to digitize contents for AI training.

The author contends that AI training, coupled with the destruction and hoarding of physical books, threatens human creativity, ownership, and future access to literature, urging ethical reflection on data acquisition and copyright in AI development.

In June 2025, a U.S. District Court ruling in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC found Anthropic’s use of digitized printed books to train Claude’s language models to be fair use, despite pirated copies being illegal, due to transformation and non-reproduction of source texts.