According to court documents and industry reports, 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. The process targets pre-2022 books preferred as free of AI-generated content, with services facilitating anonymous bulk orders of up to one million volumes. A federal judge ruled the digitization of purchased books, accompanied by destruction of the physical copies, qualifies as fair use. 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. Anthropic previously conducted a large-scale version of the practice under an internal effort known as 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.” Anthropic hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for Google Books, to obtain books. A vendor proposal referenced converting 500,000 to two million books over a six-month period.