Anthropic and Zoom Books: Destroying Books for AI

Anthropic and Zoom Books: Destruction of Books for AI

Between 2024 and 2025, Anthropic had up to two million books cut up and recycled to feed its model Claude, according to court documents unsealed in late January 2026. At the same time, booksellers in several countries began receiving unusual overnight orders from the Canadian company Zoom Books, suspected of similarly fueling the training of a generative AI.

By purchasing physical copies instead of downloading pirated versions, Anthropic invoked fair use, the exception that allows the training of artificial intelligence on protected works when a court deems the use transformative.

Anthropic conducted this program under the codename Project Panama. The Washington Post reviewed over 4,000 pages of court documents submitted in a copyright lawsuit settled in 2025. The publisher of Claude purchased used books in bulk from distributors like Better World Books. A hydraulic machine cut their bindings. The pages were then fed through high-speed industrial scanners before a recycling company collected the paper. In an internal document from 2024, Anthropic referred to this program as "our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world." In the same document, the company requested silence about this project, an open secret.

Anthropic chose cutting to limit financial damages. By purchasing physical copies rather than downloading pirated versions, Anthropic invoked fair use. A company that downloads pirated copies risks, under U.S. law, damages that can reach $150,000 per work, or about €132,000. In June 2025, federal judge William Alsup ruled in favor of Anthropic. A few days later, a second magistrate issued a similar ruling in favor of Meta. Lawyers discovered in these business proposals a planned scanning capacity of between 500,000 and two million books in six months, at a cost of several tens of millions of euros.

Anthropic signed this settlement in August 2025 for an amount of $1.5 billion, or about €1.32 billion. The company must also pay $3,000 per title beyond 500,000 listed works, which is approximately €2,640. This amount only concerns illegally downloaded digital books before 2024. The millions of physical volumes cut up as part of Project Panama are exempt from this settlement.

Since early May, a German bookseller has been receiving an unusual number of automated orders every night between 3 AM and 5 AM. Booksellers worldwide are receiving suspicious orders. The German daily taz has reported similar testimonies from Spain, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Bulgaria, and the United Kingdom. In each of these countries, often in German, Bulgarian, or Spanish for a predominantly English-speaking resale market, the Canadian company Zoom Books is signing these orders. The company claims to be the leading book recycling player in North America.

When contacted by German media taz and SRF, Zoom Books denied any digitization or destruction of works. Reed Pannell, the company's development head, told taz that Zoom Books "targets non-fiction works published from 1970 onwards that have an ISBN number." When asked by the same newspaper about the identity of the final recipients of these books, the official provided no details. However, Anthropic conducted a similar operation for several months without ever revealing its true identity to the solicited booksellers.

On January 28, 2026, music publishers Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO Music sued Anthropic in a federal court in California for over 20,000 songs they claim were obtained from pirate archives before being used to train Claude.