It sounds like a Ray Bradbury story come to life.
Somewhere in America’s sprawl of warehouses, book spines were sliced by machines like cuts of salami. Scanners then processed their contents in bulk. Within milliseconds, work that may have taken humans years to produce was uploaded into the digital ether, and later used to train AI models to replicate the voice and structure of our languages.
From there, the paper became waste, which was shipped off to recycling plants to be pulped and repurposed into products like toilet paper and cardboard boxes.
In a name that evokes both a covert operation and documents exposing financial sleight of hand, Project Panama was Anthropic’s secret plan “to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings revealed in late July.
“We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this,” the document said.
