Anthropic shredded millions of books; judge finds fair use

Anthropic bought millions of used print books, sliced the spines off with hydraulic cutters, ran the loose pages through high-speed scanners, and discarded the paper — a workflow the company stood up in early 2024 to feed its Claude models. In a June 23 ruling in *Bartz v. Anthropic*, reported in detail by Ars Technica, U.S. District Judge William Alsup found the pipeline fair use, calling the training itself "'spectacularly' transformative" and treating the digitization as a format-shift of copies the company had already destroyed.

Unsealed filings gave the operation a name. Internally Anthropic called it "Project Panama," described in a planning document as an "effort to destructively scan all the books in the world." In February 2024 the company hired Tom Turvey, previously the head of partnerships at Google Books, to run it. Bulk used stock came from sellers including Better World Books.

Alsup's decision did not cover Anthropic's other library. He found that the company had also downloaded more than seven million pirated books from sources including Books3, Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror, and split that acquisition off as a separate infringement question heading to trial. The class action was brought by authors including Andrea Bartz and Kirk Wallace Johnson.