Project Panama: History and Key Facts

Project Panama is a destructive book scanning operation started in early 2024 by the American artificial intelligence corporation Anthropic. Project Panama aims to develop a dataset of books for training Anthropic's large language models.

Prior to Project Panama, Anthropic used pirated books and was sued, agreeing in 2025 to pay $1.5 billion in a settlement. The class-action copyright lawsuit revealed the existence of Project Panama through unsealed court filings, in which it was described internally as an "effort to destructively scan all the books in the world". In the same 2025 litigation, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of legally purchased books for digitization and model training constituted fair use, in contrast to its prior use of pirated copies.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Project Panama by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.