Washington Post describes Anthropic plan to scan and destroy books

The Washington Post reported on 27 January 2026 that unsealed court filings described an internal Anthropic program, called Project Panama, to buy, scan and destroy millions of physical books in order to build training data for Claude.

Why it mattered The disclosure renewed scrutiny of how AI companies obtain training data, months after Anthropic settled a $1.5 billion copyright suit brought by authors.

Corrections

  • 2026-09-26: Added the Tech Brew report of 28 January 2026 as an independent second source on the unsealed Project Panama filings; entry published.

  • 2026-10-05: Removed the Yahoo News source; the piece was a syndicated copy of a Gadget Review article, not a Washington Post original, and Yahoo is leaving the verified-publisher list. The entry keeps the Washington Post and Tech Brew sources.