Anthropic bought millions of physical books, sliced the spines off with a hydraulic machine, scanned the pages, and threw the originals away — to train Claude.
Court documents revealed an internal effort called *Project Panama*, and a $1.5 billion copyright settlement is now paying authors about $3,000 per book.
A judge ruled that the destruction was fair use.
What you'll learn:
✅ What Project Panama actually was—straight from the internal documents
✅ Why a judge called destroying books fair use
✅ How a 9x author holds "this was wrong" and "I still use Claude" at once
The line inside the documents that stung more than the destruction?
Five words.
