Leaked court document: Anthropic's 'Project Panama' aimed to secretly 'destructively scan' every book
StewartalsopIII · x · 2026-09-05
A leaked Anthropic internal document, allegedly revealed in court and shared by mazzenilsson, contains the lines: "Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world" and "We don't want it to be known that we are working on this." The poster claims the company planned to secretly shred every book on the planet and "almost got away with it."
Caveats: this comes from a single secondhand tweet; the document's authenticity and context are unverified, and "destructively scan" may simply describe a scan-then-dispose-of-physical-copies workflow (as in past book-scanning disputes). Still, the secrecy language sparked strong backlash about Anthropic's data acquisition ethics, with one responder calling the team "effectively monsters (if true)." Worth tracking for court-source confirmation.
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