Anthropic Destroyed Millions of Books to Train Claude: Was That Legal?

Anthropic bought millions of used books, sliced off the covers, and scanned every page to train Claude. A federal judge ruled that destroying books this way was legal. Court files exposed the program in January under the internal name Project Panama.

Brokers now sell the same book-buying service to other artificial intelligence (AI) firms. Why Anthropic Destroying Books Was Ruled Legal The rule is older than AI. When you buy a book, it is yours.

You can resell it, lend it, or bin it. Lawyers call that the first-sale doctrine. Judge William Alsup applied it plainly.

Anthropic “purchased its print copies fair and square,” he wrote in his June 2025 order. So the authors were not arguing about payment. They were arguing about the switch from paper to PDF.

Alsup found that switch added no copy at all. “Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed.

One replaced the other,” wrote Alsup in the Bartz v. Anthropic case. Here is the strange part.

Destroying the book is what kept it legal. Keep the paper and you hold two copies. Shred it and you hold one.

Mass book scanning has reached court before, and the precedents cut both ways. Past Cases on Mass Book Scanning in Court Inside Project Panama, Anthropic’s Book Scanning Program Anthropic tried the free route first. It had “many places from which” it could buy books, Alsup wrote.

Instead, chief executive Dario Amodei took them, to skip the “legal/practice/business slog.” Cofounder Ben Mann downloaded Books3 in early 2021, a library of 196,640 pirated titles. Five million more came from Library Genesis that June.

Two million followed from the Pirate Library Mirror in 2022. Buying started later. Anthropic hired Tom Turvey in February 2024, who had run book deals at Google.

His brief was to obtain “all the books in the world.” Contractors then cut the bindings, trimmed the pages, and scanned each copy. The order names no