II did not always love reading. In middle school, we were given a list of books to read over the summer, and one of them was Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. It was not the book that made me fall in love with reading. That came later, with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. But it became one of the most illuminating books of my life.
Two images stayed with me, and they are still there: the firemen who start fires instead of putting them out, and the people at the end who memorize books so that something will survive. I read it again as an adult, after university. It held up.
Bradbury later recalled that he wrote the first version in nine days in the basement of UCLA’s Powell Library, using typewriters that cost ten cents per half hour. He counted the dimes: nine dollars and eighty cents. That version, a novella called The Fireman, was published in 1951. When Bradbury expanded it into a novel two years later and needed a new title, he called the Los Angeles Fire Department and asked at what temperature book paper burns. The novel was published in 1953.
The story I want to tell broke while I was walking my twelfth Camino. I wanted to write about it then, but I needed time to examine the evidence and check the sources properly. So here I am.
Let me start at the beginning.
It began with Anthropic, the company behind Claude. In February 2024, Anthropic hired Tom Turvey, who had previously run partnerships for Google’s book-scanning project, and gave him a task that could fit on a Post-it note: get all the books in the world.
Turvey contacted a couple of major publishers to discuss licensing. Then he stopped writing. The company chose another route: it spent millions of dollars buying millions of books, often used, then paid contractors to remove their bindings, cut the pages to size, scan them and discard the paper originals. The reason was quality. Anthropic wanted Claude to learn from good writing, the kind an editor would approve of. Those were the company’s words, and I understand the logic.
We know this because a group of authors sued, and court records are public. What we did not know until January 2026, when The Washington Post examined the files, was that the operation had a name: Project Panama. Its purpose was written down in plain English: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The reason for the codename was also recorded: “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
On June 23, 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s AI training and its digitization of lawfully purchased books qualified as fair use. Its pirated library did not.
Here I need to slow down, because I teach copyright. When you buy a book, you own that particular copy. In the United States, this is known as the first-sale doctrine, established in Section 109 of the Copyright Act. Once a copy has been lawfully sold, the copyright owner can no longer control the distribution of that particular copy. Its owner may lend it, resell it, give it away or destroy it, but may not ordinarily reproduce it.
Anthropic, the judge wrote, had bought its print copies “fair and square” and was entitled to dispose of them as it saw fit. But the first-sale doctrine does not cover making copies. A scan is a copy, so Anthropic also needed the protection of fair use.
The judge granted it, using a sentence I keep returning to: “The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other.”
Think about that. Keep the paper beside the digital file and you own two copies of every book, which makes the legal case much more difficult. Shred the paper, and the file can be treated as the same book in a different format. This is my reading, and I have tried to find another: under this ruling, the shredder strengthens the legal argument.
The ruling was also narrower than that sentence may make it sound. The digital copies were kept inside Anthropic, with no evidence that they had been shown, shared or sold outside the company. The court treated the scans as replacements that saved space and made the books searchable. It did not announce a general rule that anyone may scan and destroy any book for any purpose.
And shredding was a choice. Google Books, Turvey’s former employer, scanned millions of library books without disbinding them. The books were returned to their libraries and put back on the shelves.
The judge also ruled that using the books to train Claude was fair use, calling the purpose and character of the training “spectacularly” transformative and, elsewhere in the decision, “quintessentially” transformative. What did not qualify as fair use was Anthropic’s acquisition and retention of more than seven million pirated book copies.
Rather than take the remaining claims to trial, Anthropic agreed, without admitting liability, to a $1.5 billion settlement covering roughly 482,000 eligible works. The award is about $3,000 per work, to be divided where necessary among the relevant copyright holders. The settlement, described as the largest known copyright recovery of its kind, received final approval on July 20, 2026.
Then, in August 2026, came Amazon.
On August 17, 404 Media published an investigation. Its reporters had hidden a tracker inside a shipment of rare books to find out which AI company was buying them. The shipment ended up at VGT3, an Amazon facility in Las Vegas. According to employees interviewed by 404 Media and online posts attributed to VGT3 workers, the operation consists of receiving printed books, removing their bindings and scanning the loose pages.
The unit even has a logo: a dinosaur baring its teeth, holding a book in its claws.
Asked about the operation, Amazon said that it “purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.”
That was the entire statement.
If the story is true, it feels almost too neat to be real. Amazon opened its online bookstore in July 1995. Thirty-one years later, it is cutting the spines off books. And if that were not enough, the newspaper that revealed Project Panama is personally owned by Jeff Bezos too.
Amazon, however, is late to the party.
Elon Musk, at least on paper, is moving in the opposite direction. On July 27, 2026, he wrote on X that he had instructed his SpaceXAI team to preserve rare books in a library and scan them “the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning.”
It was one post, and it referred only to rare books. Still, somebody said it.
Legal, then. But is it right?
Consider Scott Brown, a rare-book dealer. Five hours after publishing an essay about this practice, he received an order for a 2007 reprint of Futuria Fantasia, the fanzine Bradbury produced as a teenager. Brown described the volume as collectible rather than truly rare. About 1,350 copies of the reprint had been produced, but this one bore a personal inscription from Bradbury to its previous owner.
The order came with one special instruction: print the word “SCAN,” in capital letters, on the first line of the address label.
Brown arranged for an unsigned replacement copy to be sent instead.
Now multiply that order by the pallet. Brown argues that thousands of uncommon titles may be disappearing from the market. Many have fewer than ten copies listed online, and some books purchased for scanning appear to have been the only copies then available for sale. The precise scale has not been independently measured, but the risk is no longer theoretical.
Anthropic says none of its data-acquisition programs buys and destroys rare or antiquarian books, and I have no reason to doubt that statement. The shipment followed by 404 Media, however, did contain books sold as rare.
And then there is the secrecy. I understand why a company might use a codename. But I still believe that a plan to scan all the books in the world deserved daylight from the very beginning.
Which brings me back to Bradbury.
His firemen burn books in a society that has largely stopped reading them, surrendered its attention to faster forms of entertainment and learned to fear ideas that might offend or unsettle. The last readers preserve whatever they can in the only way left to them: they learn the books by heart. One man carries Plato’s Republic. Montag carries the Book of Ecclesiastes and remembers words from Revelation.
Today, the machine reads the book, and the book goes into the shredder.
It looks like the opposite of Bradbury’s novel, and in one sense it is: nobody is trying to prevent anyone from reading. But the book people in the novel preserve the words so that, one day, they can give them back to everyone. The book people of Las Vegas preserve the words for a model, and the paper for no one.
In 1979, Bradbury added a coda to the novel. He had discovered that, beginning in 1967, his publisher had quietly altered about seventy-five passages in an edition intended for schools. There is more than one way to burn a book, he wrote, and the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
He was thinking of censors.
So this is where I land. Is it legal? Under the specific facts considered in the Anthropic ruling, yes. Is it ethical? I do not think so, and I say that as someone who uses these models for work and has no intention of stopping.
What I would ask for is the hard way: scan the book, then put it back on the shelf. It costs more and takes longer, and I know that nine dollars and eighty cents will not cover it. But there is more than one way to burn a book, and we do not need to invent a new one.
One last thing: if you have an old book you love, keep it on the shelf.
Somebody out there may already be looking for it, with a label that says “SCAN.”
