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.

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