IT’S NOT OFTEN these days that a news story will cause my jaw to hurtle floor-wards as an outward expression of inner stupefaction. Not because the news is any less terrible than it has been at any point since, oh the last century, what with plagues, wars, a burning planet, a demented cult dismantling American democracy and so on. It’s more a case of being in that state of insensible desensitisation experienced by the frog chilling in what it thought was a bubbling whirlpool, while idly observing that the water is feckin’ roasting today.

On the face of it, it was a nobody-died sort of article. The headline was even punctuated with a question-mark, which generally doesn’t signal hair-on-fire panic. Yet suddenly I was in the grip of the sort of creepy feeling usually portrayed in apocalyptic films by a grizzled farmer staring at an empty sky and wondering aloud where all the birds have gone.

“Why is Anthropic destroying books?” asked The Guardian last week.

It wasn’t the first piece written on this relatively recent phenomenon, but it made for stark reading. It highlighted court documents relating to a North California district court copyright case, Bartz v Anthropic PBC, specifically a memo on ‘Project Panama’, one of the AI company’s efforts to improve its large language model Claude. An internal memo explained what the project entails: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The memo advises discretion: “Why use a codename? … [B]ecause we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

It’s a complicated yarn, outlining the options considered by the company to get ahold of all the books in the world. Many options were legally fraught and time-consuming, and the march of tech does not wait for any man, woman or child. Therefore – money not being an issue of course – Anthropic embarked on a buying spree, snapping up print copies of every book available, in order to “destructively” scan them to electronic form. As the court’s decision relates, the company’s vendors “stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size and scanned the........

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