# AI companies are quietly buying up millions of physical books, including rare and obscure titles, slicing them apart to scan them for training data and destroying them, under a secret programme deliberately kept from the public **Verdict: Proven.** The central claim is documented, and the documentation is the company's own. Internal records unsealed by a judge in a copyright lawsuit and made public in January 2026 show that Anthropic ran a confidential programme it called Project Panama, described in an April 2024 memo as its effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. The same memo explains the codename: the company did not want it known that it was working on this, and told employees not to discuss it outside the company. Books were bought in bulk, sliced at the spine so pages could be fed through a scanner, and not reassembled. An internal memo from October 2024 indicates millions of books had already been purchased. In an August 2024 exchange with a bulk bookseller, the executive leading the project agreed that less common books were a good place to start. Two parts of the viral version are not established and this file does not assert them: whether other AI companies ran comparable programmes could not be confirmed, and what less common meant in practice, as against genuinely rare or collectible titles, is unclear. One point is frequently missed and belongs in any honest account: a federal judge ruled that destructively scanning lawfully purchased books was fair use, so this was found to be legal. The rating here is that the described conduct occurred, not that any law was broken. Category: Science, Space & Technology · Era: 2020s · First circulated: The underlying documents were unsealed and reported in January 2026; the claim went viral in July 2026 after a 404 Media investigation on 21 July, spreading on Instagram, Facebook and Reddit, and was examined by Snopes on 3 August 2026 · Believed by: A wide audience with no single political character: writers and publishers, librarians and rare-book communities, AI critics, and a large general readership who encountered it as an emotionally striking story about books being pulped URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/project-panama-book-scanning ## Summary In July 2026 a claim spread across Instagram, Facebook and Reddit that AI companies were buying obscure and rare physical books in bulk, cutting them apart to scan them, and destroying them to build chatbots, under an internal programme whose own documentation said the work should be kept quiet. Unusually for something that travels that well, it is largely true, and the evidence is not a leak but a court file. During a copyright lawsuit brought by authors in 2024, a judge ordered Anthropic to unseal internal records. Those records, public since January 2026, describe Project Panama, defined in an April 2024 memo as the effort to destructively scan all the books in the world, with a stated reason for the codename: the company did not want the work known. Scanning at that speed requires slicing the spine off a book, and the pages are not put back. By October 2024 internal documents indicate millions of books had been bought. Two things in the viral telling go beyond the record: no confirmation exists that other AI companies did the same, and whether the targeted books were rare in any collector's sense is unclear. And one thing tends to get dropped: a federal judge ruled the practice fair use. This file separates what the documents show from what the posts added. ## The claim That AI companies have been secretly buying millions of physical books, including rare and obscure titles, destroying them by slicing them apart to scan their contents for model training data, and deliberately concealing the programme from the public. ## Origin and timeline - 2024-04-13: An internal Anthropic memo defines the programme: 'Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.' It explains the codename directly, saying a soft codename is used 'because we don't want it to be known that we are working on this', that the document is visible to all employees but should not be discussed in public areas, and that the work should not be shared with anyone outside the company. The project is led by Tom Turvey, who had previously worked at Google on partnerships including Google Books. - 2024-08-27: An email exchange begins between Turvey and Wonder Book, a firm that sells books in bulk. Turvey confirms that 'less common books are a great place to start'. Separate correspondence shows the company approaching booksellers and publishers in other languages, including the Spanish publisher Oceano. - 2024-10: An internal memo indicates the company has already purchased millions of books. The exact figure is redacted in the released version, but the surviving 'M' suffix establishes the order of magnitude. A separate 211-page partially redacted document describes the process, including how books are categorised. - 2024: A group of authors sues Anthropic, alleging it trained its models on their work without permission and that this was copyright infringement. The company argues the use was fair use. The case becomes the vehicle through which the internal records eventually reach the public. - 2025-06: A federal judge rules on the fair-use question. Destructively scanning books the company had lawfully purchased is found to be fair use. This is the part most often missing from the viral version: the conduct was tested in court and held to be lawful. - 2026-01-27: The judge having ordered the documents unsealed, the internal records become public and are reported by major outlets, including The Washington Post under the headline that the company destructively scanned millions of books to build Claude. At this stage the story is covered but does not go viral. - 2026-07-21: The investigative outlet 404 Media publishes a piece on AI companies buying old books because they are free of AI-generated text, identifying a book-data company, ISBNdb, as having marketed high-volume physical-book acquisition to AI developers. A since-removed ISBNdb blog page had described the scale in memorable terms: 'Two million books. Bought, read by machines, and returned to pulp.' ISBNdb later states that it has never purchased, scanned or sold a book for AI training or anything else, that it does not train AI models, and that the page was a test of market interest for a service never launched. - 2026-07-25 to 2026-07-29: The story spreads. Futurism publishes on the scale of the practice, Novara Media follows, and posts on Instagram, Facebook and Reddit reach a much larger audience than the January reporting had, many quoting the 'we don't want it to be known' line directly from the unsealed memo. - 2026-08-03: Snopes publishes a fact check rating the claim Mostly True: confirming the destructive scanning, the bulk purchasing, the focus on less common books and the confidential codename, while recording as undetermined whether other AI companies did the same and what 'less common' meant for actual rarity. Snopes says it contacted Anthropic to ask whether the project is ongoing and will update if the company responds. ## The evidence, claim by claim - Claim: An AI company was secretly destroying books to train a chatbot. Evidence: This is established, and by an unusually strong class of evidence: the company's own internal documents, unsealed on a judge's order and public since January 2026. The April 2024 memo states the purpose in one sentence, that Project Panama is the effort to destructively scan all the books in the world, and states the reason for the codename in another, that the company did not want the work known. Bulk purchasing is documented in correspondence with booksellers. Scanning at industrial speed requires cutting the spine off a book so the pages can be fed through a sheet-feeder, and the pages are not rebound afterwards. This is not a case where a claim outran its evidence. The evidence arrived first, in January, and the claim caught up with it six months later. - Claim: They were targeting rare and antique books specifically. Evidence: This is the part the record does not settle, and it is the part that gave the story its emotional charge. What the documents show is an August 2024 email in which the executive leading the project agreed that 'less common books are a great place to start', which supports a focus on scarcer titles but does not define it. A 211-page process document uses a link to a Book Industry Study Group category called Antiques and Collectibles as an example of categorisation, and it is not clear whether that indicates targeting antique books or simply books about antiques, which is a genuinely different thing. Snopes asked the company for clarity and had not received a response. 'Less common' in a data-acquisition context may mean titles poorly represented in existing digital corpora rather than physically scarce objects. Nobody has established that first editions or collectible copies were pulped, and this file does not assert it. - Claim: AI companies, plural, have all been doing this. Evidence: Only one is documented. Snopes rated the overall rumour Mostly True precisely because the plural could not be confirmed: it was not possible to establish whether other AI companies have carried out comparable projects. The 404 Media reporting that triggered the viral wave concerned a broker marketing bulk physical-book acquisition to AI developers generally, which is evidence that demand existed across the industry, not that specific competitors ran destructive-scanning programmes. The generalisation from one documented programme to an industry-wide practice is the single largest gap between the posts and the record. - Claim: A book-data company was brokering the destruction and then covered it up when caught. Evidence: ISBNdb's account and its deleted page do not sit comfortably together, and the honest summary is that the record is contested. A now-removed page on the company's blog described Anthropic acquiring, scanning and destroying books and included the line about two million books returned to pulp, along with a candid remark that 'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy. After the coverage, ISBNdb stated it has never purchased, scanned or sold a book for AI training or anything else, that it does not and never has trained AI models, and that the page was a test of market interest for a service that was never brought to life. Both things can be true: a company can market a service it never delivers. What the deleted page establishes is that someone in the book-data business thought there was a market. It does not establish that this company brokered any of it. - Claim: This was illegal, and that is why it was kept secret. Evidence: A federal judge ruled in June 2025 that destructively scanning books the company had lawfully bought was fair use. On the question the court actually decided, the practice was lawful, and this file makes no allegation of criminality against any company or person. That leaves the secrecy needing a different explanation than illegality, and the documents supply one themselves: the reputational problem. The deleted ISBNdb page put it plainly in noting that destroying two million books is not a sympathetic headline. Something can be entirely legal and still be the kind of thing an organisation would rather not read about itself, and the April 2024 memo reads much more like a company managing that than one hiding a crime. - Claim: Destroying the physical copy is the point. They could have scanned them without wrecking them. Evidence: Non-destructive scanning exists and is what libraries use, but it is slow and expensive per volume, because a human or a robotic arm must turn every page. Cutting the spine and feeding loose sheets through a document scanner is dramatically faster and cheaper, which is what makes it viable at a scale of millions. The choice is about throughput, not about wanting the books gone. That distinction matters for how the practice should be judged: the loss of the physical copies is a consequence of the method rather than its purpose, which is a fair thing to criticise but a different criticism from the one most posts are making. ## Why people believe it - The strongest line in the story is a direct quotation from the company's own memo. 'We don't want it to be known that we are working on this' needs no interpretation, no expert, and no trust in a journalist. People believed it because they could read it themselves. - Destroying books carries enormous cultural weight, far more than the underlying data question does. Pulping is an image with centuries of association behind it, and a claim that lands on that association does not have to argue for its own significance. - The story arrived pre-verified. Unusually, the documents were public in January and the virality came in July, so anyone who checked found the claim held up. That is the opposite of the normal pattern and it built justified confidence, which then carried the unverified additions along with it. - It fits an existing and largely accurate picture of how training data has been gathered, in which permission is sought late if at all. A lawsuit by authors was already underway, so the programme slotted into a controversy people already understood. - The overreach is small and therefore hard to notice. Moving from one documented company to 'AI companies', or from 'less common' to 'rare and antique', are short steps. Claims that fail usually fail because they are wildly wrong; this one spread because it was mostly right. ## Open questions - Whether Project Panama is still running is unknown. Snopes asked Anthropic directly whether the project was ongoing and reported no response by publication. - What 'less common' meant operationally is the most consequential open question, because it separates a data-coverage strategy from the destruction of scarce cultural objects. The documents support the phrase but not an interpretation of it. - Whether other AI companies ran comparable programmes remains unconfirmed. The existence of brokers marketing bulk physical-book acquisition suggests industry-wide demand, but no other company's internal records have been unsealed. - The unresolved policy question is whether a fair-use finding is the right frame for a practice that consumes physical objects. The court addressed copying, not disposal, and no legal regime currently treats the destruction of a lawfully owned book as a distinct harm. ## Sources - Are AI companies scanning and destroying millions of books, including rare titles?, Snopes (2026): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books/ - AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop, 404 Media (2026): https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/ - AI Firms Are Buying up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them, Novara Media (2026): https://novaramedia.com/2026/07/29/ai-firms-are-buying-up-old-books-then-scanning-and-destroying-them/ - Fact Check: At least one AI company is scanning and destroying millions of books, including 'less common' titles, Snopes, syndicated via Yahoo News (2026): https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/fact-check-least-one-ai-175300011.html - Bartz v. Anthropic, Wikipedia (2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartz_v._Anthropic - Antiques and Collectibles (subject category), Book Industry Study Group (2026): https://www.bisg.org/antiques-and-collectibles Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/project-panama-book-scanning