Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Turns out, Google created some seriously nifty infrared camera technology that detects the three-dimensional shape and angle of book pages when the book is placed in the scanner. This information is transmitted to the OCR software, which adjusts for the distortions and allows the OCR software to read text more accurately. No more broken bindings, no more inefficient glass plates. Google has finally figured out a way to digitize books en masse. For all those who've pondered "How'd They Do That?" you finally have an answer.

We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations.

AI companies are purchasing physical books in bulk, including rare and out-of-print titles, then using high-speed machines to cut the spines and scan the pages before disposing of the originals, according to court documents and industry reports.

Court filings unsealed in connection with a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic detailed Project Panama, which began in early 2024.

An internal planning document stated that “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The same document added that “We use a ‘soft codename’ for it because we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this. This document is visible to all Anthropic employees, but you should avoid talking about it in public areas, and the fact that we are working on this should not be shared with anyone outside Anthropic.”

In a June 2025 ruling in Bartz v. Anthropic, U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California held that digitizing legally purchased print books and using the resulting digital copies to train large language models was fair use. The judge noted that the process replaced the print copies with digital versions without adding new copies or redistributing them. Anthropic later settled related claims involving pirated digital books for $1.5 billion.