Whose literary production?: Anthropic’s Project Panama

Publishers in Bangladesh expressed that the recent surge in AI activity has not yet had a significant impact on their publishing practices or the Bangladeshi book market. The concern, however, may lie further ahead. As AI companies expand their appetite for literary material, Bangla literature, too, could become part of the vast pool of texts used to train future models. For a language with a rich literary tradition but a comparatively smaller publishing market, the question is not whether this possibility exists, but how prepared the industry will be when it arrives.

What happened with Anthropic’s Project Panama offers a glimpse into where that possibility could lead. Known for creating the AI-based chatbot Claude, Anthropic initiated the Project Panama in 2024 which they called as their “effort to destructively scan all the books in the world” as revealed by internal documents in legal filings. The goal was to feed the knowledge of these books into its AI products including Claude, to build a world-class model that would not rely on mimicking patterns or ‘internet speak’ but churn out curated facts. After initially considering digitally pirated books, Anthropic shifted to bulk buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers. Within a year, Anthropic spent tens of millions of dollars procuring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and last surviving book copies.

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All the specifics regarding Project Panama which were previously unreported, surfaced after a number of book authors brought a class-action copyright lawsuit against Anthropic. A district judge’s ruling to unseal documents spanning over 4,000 pages in January 2026 opened a can of worms. These legal filings laid out the lengths to which tech firms like Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI have gone to acquire enormous amounts of data to train their AI models. The Anthropic case concluded in June 2026 with a federal judge approving of the landmark USD 1.5 billion settlement, covering nearly 500,000 eligible works. The judge found that Anthropic was well within its rights to scan data from books to train its AI models. They deemed this practice as transformative fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy remains. However, the court also ruled that the central library Anthropic created from digital piracy needed to be permanently destroyed.

This ruling drew the line at how the books were acquired and not whether the books were being used to train AI models or being destroyed. The court reduced it to a matter of legal property which if legally bought can be destroyed if needed. It focused on the transactional question of whether the capital changed hands, and not the ethical intent or impact of how the intellectual property or cultural heritage would be used. The court did not even address Anthropic’s choice to opt for destructive scanning method even though non-destructive scanning exists which does not require cutting the spines. The case used the law for individual resale to legitimize the law of mass extraction at capital scale.

What makes the court ruling all the more uncomfortable is that destructive scanning of rare or last surviving copies of books from earlier centuries is now turning previously accessible public knowledge into private capital whose access and form is decided by the capitalist. Accessing and preserving knowledge will now be a privilege that will be decided by the AI corporate giant.

The question, however, goes beyond whether Anthropic had the legal right to destroy books it had purchased. A book is more than the information contained within its pages. For centuries, books have served as repositories of knowledge and records of human history. Their editions, bindings, illustrations, annotations and dedications can reveal how a text was produced, circulated and received. When a book is cut apart and reduced to machine-readable text, much of that material history disappears with it. What remains may be useful to a machine, but it is not necessarily the same cultural object that existed before.

Digitisation itself is not new to libraries or archives. Fragile manuscripts, rare books and out-of-print works have long been scanned to protect their contents from deterioration and make them available to readers. The difference lies in the purpose and ownership of the process. A library generally digitises a book to preserve it and expand access to it. Project Panama treated books as raw material for a commercial AI system. Anthropic’s mass acquisition of physical books therefore raises a question that goes beyond copyright: what happens when preservation becomes extraction?

This is an excerpt. Read the full article on The Daily Star and Star Books and Literature website.

Towrin Zaman is a climate researcher and an eclectic reader.

Mahmuda Emdad is a sub-editor at Star Books and Literature.