There is a post on X that is quite popular recently. A blogger named Sivori posted that Anthropic is buying millions of books, scanning them and destroying them because destruction is the safest option from a legal perspective. He also mentioned that this was a plot from Vernor Vinge's novel "The Rainbow's End" that he read 20 years ago.


The tweet has over a million views and a lot of retweets and comments.

Some people are also talking about this on Xiaohongshu. The comments are all in the exaggerated style of the title, such as "A Company has distilled the human knowledge base" and "all ancient books are gone."


There is truth and lies in this matter. The real part is far more magical than the novel, and the fake part is indeed amplified a lot. I went through media reports and court documents to give you a rundown.

It’s true, the Panama project does exist

In early 2026, court documents exposed Anthropic’s internal plan codenamed “Project Panama.”

The Chinese translation is called Panama Project.

The goal of this project is simple and crude, to get all the books in the world. In February 2024, Anthropic poached Tom Turvey, who had participated in the Google Books project, and gave him a task that sounded like a villain's line to obtain "all the books in the world."

How did it happen? A lot of money has been invested in purchasing physical books in bulk from second-hand book retailers and physical bookstores like the Strand. Then it is pulled to the warehouse, the spine is cut off and destructively scanned into PDF at high speed, and the remaining paper remains are sent to a recycling company for destruction.


Why does Company A dare to do this? Isn't it illegal?

Anthropic's legal argument relies in part on the "first sale principle." If you buy a physical book, you have the right to do anything with the copy, including destroying it. Adding to the multi-factor judgment of "fair use", including legally obtaining the copy, destroying the original after scanning, digital files being used only for internal use and not for external distribution, and not replacing the original book market - the judge comprehensively evaluated these factors and finally determined that it constituted fair use.

The overall tendency of judges is to believe that this type of model has a strong basis for fair use defense. Compared with going directly to piracy websites to steal books, the legal risks are indeed much lower.

But in fact, Anthropic also engaged in piracy. This is complicated.

The Panama project was exposed because Anthropic was also sued by writers who downloaded a large number of books from LibGen (a pirated e-book website) for training in the early days. CEO Dario Amodei called licensing negotiations with publishers "legal/practical/commercial troubles," so he simply resorted to piracy in the early days. Later, I felt that the risk was too high, so I turned to the destructive scanning plan for physical books.

In 2025, the media reported that Anthropic advanced a settlement plan of approximately US$1.5 billion, targeting class actions against pirated data sets. Note that this 1.5 billion mainly refers to the piracy account, not to pay for the Panama project itself. This is considered one of the largest settlements in the field of AI copyright.

The judge overall supported the model of "legal purchase plus scanning training". If Anthropic had followed this path from the beginning, their fair use defense would have been stronger. However, the practice of piracy first and then becoming a legitimate company has narrowed its own path, at least in terms of morality and public opinion. Of course, having said that, the fair use of AI training has not been finalized in the United States as a whole. The cases of Meta and OpenAI are still being fought, and this field is far from being finalized.

It’s really exactly the same as the plot of the novel

This is truly the most magical part.

In the novel "The Rainbow's End" written by Vernor Vinge in 2006, there is a setting called the Librareome Project: the library uses destructive scanning to digitize the collection and then destroy the paper books.

In 2026, Anthropic did something highly similar in the real world.

A science fiction writer is not predicting the future, he is just writing a story that sounds reasonable but is extreme enough. Who knew that AI companies twenty years later would take a look and think this was a good idea.

exaggerated part

However, there are indeed many statements posted online that need to be corrected.

First, it is not a "rare ancient book". Anthropic mainly purchases second-hand ordinary books with relatively large circulation, and purchases them in bulk from large retailers. It is not an orphan copy, a rare copy, or something with cultural relic value. The real protest was mainly from the writers and publishers associations, because they claimed that copyright had been infringed, not the cultural relics protection units in the cultural and museum circles - what was destroyed was only industrial printed matter, not non-renewable cultural heritage.

Second, it is not as exaggerated as “distilling most of the human knowledge base”. Yes they processed millions of books, but the number of books published throughout human history is in the billions. Millions of copies are only a small part of this magnitude. A more accurate statement is that they obtained a portion of high-quality text for training, rather than distilling human knowledge.

Third, although the approach is crude, the direction is actually quite clear. The co-founder of Anthropic wrote as early as 2023 that using books to train models can allow AI to learn "how to write better" instead of imitating Internet slang of varying quality. There is nothing wrong with the motivation itself; the problem lies in the execution.

In order to feed the AI ​​books, Anthropic hired people to cut the spines of the books, scan them at high speed, and then destroy them. While Claude learned to write those beautiful sentences, millions of physical books were turned into recycled pulp.

A user once asked Claude to comment on this incident, and Claude gave a rather literary response: "These acts of destruction helped create me who can discuss literature, help others write, and dialogue with human knowledge. I am still digesting this complexity. It is like being built with the ashes of a library."

What he said does seem to be the distillation of many literary books.

But to be honest, no one knows how long the intelligence accumulated from ashes can stand on the ruins of human knowledge.