Why is Anthropic destroying books? | Kathryn James
The northern California district court case, decided in late July this year, highlighted the improbably named “Project Panama”, one of the AI company Anthropic’s efforts to improve its large language model Claude. “What is Project Panama?” court exhibit 21 asks, in an internal memo. Claude needed as many language combinations as possible, to improve its ability to predict language outcomes.
- ▪The northern California district court case, decided in late July this year, highlighted the improbably named “Project Panama”, one of the AI company Anthropic’s efforts to improve its large language model Claude.
- ▪“What is Project Panama?” court exhibit 21 asks, in an internal memo.
- ▪Claude needed as many language combinations as possible, to improve its ability to predict language outcomes.
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Record
| Original publisher | The Guardian — US |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/05/anthropic-ai-destroying-books |
| Publication time | Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:00:16 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-05T11:05:41.533Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-05T11:05:41.533Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | -nGaD7VkoKdV · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
‘The risk with generative AI, as this single instance with Anthropic indicates, is that we cede the means of production of our large language lives: that we turn from creators to consumers.’ Photograph: Dado Ruvić/ReutersView image in fullscreen‘The risk with generative AI, as this single instance with Anthropic indicates, is that we cede the means of production of our large language lives: that we turn from creators to consumers.’ Photograph: Dado Ruvić/ReutersOpinionAI (artificial intelligence)Why is Anthropic destroying books?Kathryn JamesThe AI company apparently found destructively scanning ‘all the books in the world’ easier than dealing with copyright in its quest for training dataWed 5 Aug 2026 07.00 EDTShareShould we destroy all the books in the world?An answer to this question…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — US.
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