Anthropic Shredded Millions of Physical Books to Train Claude Legally, Paying $1.5B
aitrendz_xyz · x · 2026-07-30
A viral thread details the timeline of Anthropic's largest copyright settlement in history ($1.5 billion) over pirated books used to train Claude.
- Piracy & Settlement: Anthropic initially pirated over 7 million books from shadow libraries. Facing lawsuits, they settled for $1.5 billion (around $3,000 per book).
- Project Panama: To find a legal loophole for data acquisition, Anthropic launched this project. They bought physical books, sliced off the spines, scanned the pages, and fed the original physical copies into a shredder.
- The Legal Strategy: A judge ruled that scanning and keeping a book is infringement, but "scanning and destroying" it is fair use because it replaces the copy rather than adding a new one. This destructive shredding process became the core strategy to legalize the data.
- Permanent Digital Retention: Although the physical books were destroyed, Anthropic gets to keep the digital scans locked away forever. The authors received a check while their physical works were turned into shredded paper.
Related event: Anthropic Exposed for Destroying Books to Train AI(4 posts)→
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