In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
Democracy Dies in Darkness
Inside an AI start-up’s plan to scan and dispose of millions of books
Court filings reveal how AI companies raced to obtain more books to feed chatbots, including by buying, scanning and disposing of millions of titles.
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