𝐁𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐞

btw anthropic's internal document on this literally said "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this.” it was called project panama. here's exactly what happened: 1: anthropic concluded that books were the cheapest way to build a world-class model because they gave claude curated facts, structured arguments, compelling stories, and writing “an editor would approve of.” 2: once anthropic decided it needed books at enormous scale, its first solution was piracy. it downloaded 7m+ books from online libraries including libgen. the judge later wrote that although anthropic had legal ways to buy them, it chose piracy to avoid what dario amodei called the “legal/practice/business slog.” 3: that piracy created a massive legal risk. so in february 2024, anthropic hired tom turvey, the former head of partnerships for google books, to find a legally safer way of obtaining “all the books in the world.” 4: turvey first contacted major publishers about licensing their catalogs. those attempts didn’t produce agreements, so anthropic chose a route that required no publisher permission: buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers. 5: within about a year, anthropic spent tens of millions acquiring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and 1/1 titles. one vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books in six months. 6: to scan that many books within months, the vendors physically dismantled them. a hydraulic cutter removed each spine. the pages were trimmed to size, fed as loose sheets through high-speed industrial scanners, and converted into searchable PDFs. the paper remains were then sent for recycling. 7: these PDFs were fed into claude as training data. the complete collection became a private, searchable anthropic library that the company planned to “store forever.” the scans aren’t available to the public and were never open-sourced.