Joe Rogan figured it might just be a conspiracy theory that AI companies were secretly buying millions of books, scanning them, and destroying the originals. Then Jamie looked it up. It’s 100% real. ROGAN: “Oh my god, it’s true.” The deeper they dug, the more upset Rogan got. Anthropic had an internal code name for the operation: “Project Panama.” THE INTERNAL MEMO SAID: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” ROGAN’S REACTION: “Meaning they know that they’re doing something that will cause people to f***ing freak out and revolt.” “The training data is other people’s work. It’s books. That’s what’s insane.” “The idea that you could… burn all the books so that your company succeeds and other ones don’t is the problem we’re talking about.” WHAT HAPPENED: Anthropic needed a mountain of books to train its AI. So it bought millions of them. Workers cut the spines off, scanned every page, and threw the books out when they were done. They wanted to keep this a secret, but then a group of authors sued in a case known as Bartz v. Anthropic. To Rogan’s dismay, the judge ruled the scanning was “fair use,” so Anthropic was allowed to do it. Where the company got in trouble was the pirated stuff. On top of the books it bought, Anthropic had downloaded millions more from pirate sites for free, and the judge wouldn’t let that go. That ended up costing them $1.5 billion, the biggest copyright settlement in U.S. history, or about $3,000 per pirated book.