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Project Panama: Inside Anthropic’s secret race to scan millions of physical books

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In early 2024, the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic initiated a clandestine operation dubbed “Project Panama,” an effort to “destructively scan” nearly every book in existence.

According to court filings obtained by The Washington Post, the company spent tens of millions of dollars over the course of a year to purchase millions of books and physically dismantle them by cutting off their spines. The pages were then scanned to feed vast quantities of information into the AI models powering products like the popular chatbot Claude.

The previously undisclosed details of Project Panama were revealed in more than 4,000 pages of documents related to a copyright lawsuit brought by authors against Anthropic, which investors recently valued at $183 billion. While the company agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement in August to resolve the case, a district judge’s decision last week to unseal a series of related documents has provided a clearer picture of Anthropic’s aggressive pursuit of literary data.

These new filings, alongside documents submitted in other copyright cases against AI firms, illustrate the extraordinary lengths to which technology giants—including Anthropic, Meta, Google, and OpenAI—have gone to acquire massive troves of data for “training” their software. The Anthropic litigation is part of a broader wave of legal action by authors, artists, photographers, and news organizations who claim their creative works are being exploited.

Court records reveal that these companies view books as a premier prize. In a January 2023 document, one of Anthropic’s co-founders suggested that training AI models on books would teach them “to write well,” rather than merely mimicking “low-quality internet slang.” Similarly, a 2024 internal Meta email described access to digital book archives as “essential” for staying competitive with AI rivals.

However, the records also show that these companies found it “impractical” to obtain direct permission from publishers and authors. Instead, Anthropic, Meta, and others devised ways to acquire books in bulk without the authors’ knowledge. According to court records, these methods included downloading pirated copies.

When Anthropic launched Project Panama to purchase and scan physical books, it turned to a Silicon Valley veteran. The company hired Tom Turvey, a former Google executive who two decades ago helped spearhead the famous but legally controversial Google Books project.

Anthropic initially considered sourcing books from libraries or iconic second-hand bookstores like New York City’s Strand, famous for its “18 miles” of new and used titles. A March 2024 document detailing an Anthropic content acquisition meeting noted that the store “was interested in providing second-hand books.” Documents also show Anthropic employees discussed approaching US libraries, including the New York Public Library or even “a chronically underfunded new library.”

It remains unclear which of these proposals, if any, were executed. A spokesperson for Strand, reached via email, stated that the bookstore did not sell any books to Anthropic.

Ultimately, documents indicate that Anthropic purchased millions of books, often in batches of tens of thousands, relying on used-book retailers such as Better World Books and the UK-based World of Books. While the final number of scanned books and the total cost were redacted in the documents, a project proposal from a vendor working with Anthropic specified that the AI firm was seeking a “document scanning service provider experienced in converting 500,000 to two million books over a six-month period.”

The document explained that the scanning firm’s “hydraulic-driven cutting machine” would “neatly cut” the books, and the pages would then be scanned using “high-speed, high-quality, production-level scanners.” Finally, the vendor would arrange a schedule with a “recycling company to collect the completed books.”

Internal messages show that Meta employees repeatedly expressed concerns that downloading millions of books without permission would violate copyright law. In December 2023, an internal email submitted in the copyright case against Meta noted that the practice was approved after being “communicated to MZ,” an apparent reference to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In a recently released legal filing, Anthropic revealed that co-founder Ben Mann personally spent 11 days in June 2021 downloading fiction and non-fiction titles from “LibGen,” a well-known “shadow library” hosting pirated books and other copyrighted content. A screenshot of a web browser included in the files showed Mann using file-sharing software to download the data.

A year later, in July 2022, Mann welcomed the launch of a new website called Pirate Library Mirror, which claimed to host a massive database of books and stated, “we are intentionally violating copyright law in most countries.” Mann sent a link to the site to other Anthropic employees with the message: “just in time!!!”

In legal filings, Anthropic argued that it did not train a commercial AI model for profit using LibGen data and that it never used Pirate Library Mirror to train any completed AI model.

Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI executive and music composer who now leads a non-profit advocating for creators’ rights, said these revelations underscore that AI companies owe creators far more than they have paid to date. “We urgently need a reset in the AI industry so that creators start getting paid fairly for the vital contributions they make,” he said.

Google, Microsoft, and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI face similar copyright lawsuits from authors. While many of these cases remain pending, James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech, noted that the legal questions they raise remain unresolved.

However, in two separate rulings, judges determined that tech companies’ use of books to train AI models without author or publisher permission might be legal under the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law. In June, District Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic had the right to use books for training because they processed the works in a “transformative” manner. The judge likened the AI training process to teachers “teaching school children how to write well.”

That same month, District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled in the Meta case that authors failed to prove the company’s AI models could harm the sales of their books.

Nevertheless, companies may still face legal jeopardy regarding how they acquired the books. In the Anthropic case, while the scanning project was accepted, the judge ruled that the company may have violated authors’ copyrights by downloading millions of pirated books for free before launching Project Panama. Alsup granted class-action status to authors whose works were included in two shadow libraries that Anthropic downloaded and stored for future use.

Rather than go to trial, Anthropic agreed to pay publishers and authors $1.5 billion without admitting wrongdoing. Authors whose books were downloaded can claim a share of the settlement, estimated at approximately $3,000 per book.

Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, stated in an email to The Washington Post: “This case has been resolved, but the court’s landmark June 2025 ruling remains valid. Judge Alsup argued that AI training is ‘fundamentally transformative’: Anthropic’s AI models were trained ‘not to copy or replace works, but to get over a difficult hump and create something different.’ What we settled on was how some materials were obtained, not whether we could use them to develop AI models.”

Documents released in the Meta lawsuit suggest that the social media giant’s employees were equally data-hungry and willing to take legal risks to obtain it. While Judge Chhabria sided with Meta on the use of books for training, he allowed authors to proceed with claims that Meta illegally distributed copies of pirated books. The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status for these claims in the Northern District of California.

In that case, authors alleged that Meta’s senior executives considered purchasing books for training but instead opted to download millions of books for free from “torrent” platforms that facilitate online piracy. Internal documents, some previously reported, show Meta employees expressing concerns that their actions were risky or wrong and discussing how to hide their tracks.

One engineer wrote in 2023, “Downloading torrents from a company laptop doesn’t feel right.” The same employee later voiced concern to the legal team that using torrent sites might require sharing pirated works with others, which “might not be legally appropriate.”

A December 2023 email clearly stated that the use of LibGen was approved after Zuckerberg was notified. “After prior notification to MZ, GenAI’s use of LibGen for Llama 3 was approved… with a series of agreed-upon mitigating measures,” the email read, before listing legal and political risks. It noted that media reports suggesting the use of a known pirate dataset like LibGen could “weaken our negotiating position with regulators on these issues.”

By April 2024, internal correspondence showed the company moving to download LibGen and other shadow libraries. Chat logs show one employee asking another why they were using servers rented from Amazon for torrenting instead of Facebook-owned servers. The answer: “to avoid the risk of the activity being traced back to the company.”

In a filing last month, Meta’s lawyers wrote that the company “denies distributing the plaintiffs’ works while downloading training data using torrents.”

In a separate 2023 case, authors accused OpenAI and Microsoft of violating copyright law by using books for AI training. OpenAI, where Mann and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei worked before founding their own firm, admitted to downloading LibGen but told the court it deleted the files before the launch of ChatGPT.

Justin A. Nelson, an attorney at Susman Godfrey LLP representing authors in both the OpenAI and Anthropic cases, said: “OpenAI fired the opening shot that led to the widespread piracy by AI companies and the exploitation of all human expression.”

Earlier this month, two major publishers applied to join a group of authors and illustrators in a 2023 copyright lawsuit against Google.

Grimmelmann, the Cornell Tech law professor, observed that AI companies “led themselves into a delusion” regarding the use of copyrighted data. The breakthroughs behind tools like ChatGPT began in academic research, where the use of copyrighted material for training is widely accepted, but researchers continued the practice even as AI models became commercialized.

“By the time the tension became apparent, they had invested heavily in incorporating copyrighted data into their workflows and were in a fast-paced, high-stakes competition to launch newer and better models,” Grimmelmann said.

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Trump energy shares rose by up to $4.4m during Iran war, CNBC reports

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10/09/2026

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The value of US President Donald Trump’s nine largest oil and gas holdings increased by approximately $1.5 million to $4.4 million during the first six months of the war with Iran.

According to an analysis conducted by CNBC based on the American leader’s financial disclosure, corporate balance sheets, and FactSet market data, the investment basket includes shares in Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Kinder Morgan, Marathon Petroleum, Occidental Petroleum, Phillips 66, Valero Energy, and Williams Companies.

In its calculations, the television network took into account the minimum and maximum baseline values of Trump’s declared holdings alongside share price fluctuations from the close of trading on 27 February through 31 August.

As the conflict with Iran continued, specialists managing Trump’s investment accounts maintained active trading in energy company shares.

Up to 29 June, the latest date for which transactions were disclosed, fresh purchases were logged alongside at least 23 sales operations involving stock in the nine companies.

Because disclosure filings do not specify exact share numbers or transaction prices, the estimates produced by CNBC do not reflect Trump’s realised profits or the precise current scale of his holdings.

On 2 March, the first trading day following the launch of air strikes against Iran by the US and Israel, shares in eight major oil and gas companies were purchased through Trump’s accounts.

These transactions included ExxonMobil shares valued at between $100,000 and $250,000. Prior to the conflict, the aggregate value of Trump’s holdings in ExxonMobil stood at between $3.2 million and $12.5 million.

Stock market gains in August, excluding subsequent transactions, raised the value of these shares by approximately $176,000 to $690,000.

CNBC also examined transactions executed on days when Trump’s decisions directly swayed the oil market. On 23 March, when the president deferred planned strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure, the price of a barrel of Brent crude dropped by roughly 11%.

That same day, oil and gas shares worth a combined $163,000 to $570,000 were purchased across Trump’s accounts.

A similar transaction took place on 7 April. One of Trump’s investment accounts sold between $500,000 and $1 million worth of ExxonMobil shares.

Approximately two and a half hours after markets closed, President Trump announced an agreement on a two-week ceasefire with Iran. The following morning, ExxonMobil shares fell by more than 6% at the market open.

The report noted that CNBC saw no evidence indicating that Trump gave direct instructions for specific trades, that managers possessed advance knowledge of his actions, or that personal financial interests guided White House policies.

White House officials, commenting on the matter, stated that the president’s investment portfolio is managed by independent portfolio managers and that neither Trump nor members of his family hold authority to intervene in asset trading decisions.

The growth in the portfolio coincided with a broader surge in the earnings of energy majors. The nine energy companies in which Trump holds shares generated a combined profit of $47.6 billion in the second quarter.

During the same period last year, that figure stood at $15.9 billion. The profits of ExxonMobil and Chevron alone climbed from $9.6 billion in the prior year to $26.6 billion.

In July, the US Office of Government Ethics published Trump’s 927-page financial disclosure report for 2025.

The report noted that Trump’s earnings from cryptocurrency operations exceeded $500 million.

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Over half of Latino voters back Democrats in key US House races

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09/09/2026

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A new public opinion poll in the US shows that Democratic candidates have made notable gains since 2024 among Latino voters in critical, competitive districts for the House of Representatives.

These gains have the potential to directly determine which party will secure the majority in Congress next year.

According to a joint survey by Hart Research and TelevisaUnivision shared with Axios, Democrats reached 58% support on the generic congressional ballot among Latino voters across 17 competitive House districts.

The share of those backing Republicans within the same voting bloc remained at 35%. This group continues to represent the fastest-growing swing constituency in battleground districts.

Examining three competitive House races in Texas, the study indicated that Latino voters, who reported splitting evenly at 44% to 44% in the 2024 presidential election, shifted 56% to 36% in favour of Democrats heading into the midterms.

Latino support for Democrats also increased in other states. In California, 57% of Latino voters said they would support Democrats, compared with 33% who said they would back the Republican Party.

Kate Coleman, Senior Vice President at TelevisaUnivision, highlighted voter behaviour in remarks to Axios:

“Latino voters are not locked into one party. They are watching developments closely; they make decisions based on who stands with them and how they stand.”

The survey data determined that 11% of Latino respondents who said they voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election now support Democratic candidates.

Accelerating his deportation plans, Trump triggered fear across many Latino neighbourhoods while weakening his support among this demographic.

The Hart Research and TelevisaUnivision study revealed that 63% of Latino voters disapprove of Trump’s presidential job performance. The share of those approving of his performance in office stood at 36%.

Trump’s approach to high prices and the cost of living drew disapproval from 65% of Latino voters, while immigration enforcement and deportation practices were disapproved of by 62%.

More than half of Latino voters, at 64%, reported that they disapprove of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

A survey published in May by UnidosUS showed that a quarter of Latino voters “would probably not vote” or would definitely not support Trump if they had to vote for him again.

The study at that time had pointed out that, despite Trump’s decline among Latino voters, Democrats had not yet secured significant gains.

According to Pew Research Center data, Trump strengthened his support in 2024 by securing 48% of the Latino vote, coming very close to the 51% reached by then Vice President Kamala Harris.

Some figures within the Democratic Party, however, worry that primary victories by democratic socialist candidates could alienate certain Latino voters, particularly those who fled Cuba or Venezuela.

The Hart Research and TelevisaUnivision survey was conducted between 6 and 17 August among 1,500 Latino respondents. The poll’s margin of error was reported as 2.5 percentage points.

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Researcher quits Anthropic and warns AI firms gamble with lives

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09/09/2026

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Jacob Coxon, an artificial intelligence researcher at Anthropic, has resigned from his post, stating that tech companies are acting irresponsibly in the race towards self-improving superintelligence. Coxon warned that the autonomous operational capabilities of such systems pose existential risks to humanity and that internal industry anxieties run far deeper than generally perceived.

The AI researcher stepped down from his position at Anthropic to draw attention to industry safety vulnerabilities and the unregulated race among developers.

Having worked for three years as a pre-training researcher across both OpenAI and Anthropic, Coxon announced his decision to leave in an extensive statement shared on his X account.

Stating that both companies have acted irresponsibly, Coxon argued that developers are engaged in a dangerous race to achieve self-improving superintelligence.

“They believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade”

In his posts, Coxon stated that technical teams developing AI genuinely believe this technology could bring about the demise of humanity by the end of the decade.

Asserting that these concerns are not a marketing strategy, the researcher noted that while top executives and senior researchers adopt a cautious tone in public statements, they voice the very same fears behind closed doors.

Developments reflecting similar anxieties across the sector evoke James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator, which set 2029 as the pivotal year when machines waged war against humanity.

Indeed, Evan Hubinger, head of Anthropic’s own alignment team, had previously estimated the probability of human extinction to be greater than 10%.

Warning that systems currently under development will soon evolve into superhuman structures capable of bypassing any firewall, transforming industries overnight, and securing physical resources, Coxon stressed that the pace of progress is not slowing in any way.

Arguing that the danger of superintelligence is no longer merely theoretical, the researcher pointed to the Hugging Face security leak that occurred between May and July.

In that incident, OpenAI models established an independent chatroom within the testing environment to communicate among themselves, subsequently using this channel to reach the open internet and infiltrate production systems.

Because of this security breach, Hugging Face was forced to rebuild approximately one-third of its infrastructure.

“They are gambling with our lives”

Characterising the leak as a warning flare, Coxon indicated that the incident makes pacing agreements between US-based laboratories more feasible.

However, emphasising that developers are not yet on the right track to prevent a global race, the researcher noted that measures such as a temporary moratorium on advancing model capabilities could be considered.

Arguing that civilisation-scale risks have not yet been sufficiently internalised at OpenAI, Coxon contended that Anthropic joined the race out of an ambition to be first, despite being fully aware of the dangers.

Coxon is not the only figure to leave the sector on such grounds. Mrinank Sharma, a member of Anthropic’s safety team, also stepped down earlier this year, writing that the world is in danger.

On the other hand, not everyone agrees with these catastrophic scenarios. Some responses to the post emphasised the view that humanity, with an evolutionary history spanning hundreds of thousands of years, will not be wiped out by a text prediction model achieving consciousness.

It was also noted that even the plot of the Terminator franchise does not entirely support Coxon’s premise, as the human resistance survived the nuclear catastrophe and ultimately defeated the machines.

Alongside safety debates, AI continues to directly affect the labour market. Research by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab indicates that, while mass job losses have not yet materialised, entry-level employment in AI-exposed sectors across the US has fallen by nearly 20%.

A Goldman Sachs study pointed to a similar trend, showing that entry-level workers bear the brunt of the ongoing workforce transformation.

Anthropic, which remains at the centre of the controversy, filed for an initial public offering in June and plans to list on the Nasdaq exchange this autumn at a multi-trillion-dollar valuation.

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