According to recent court documents, Anthropic, the developer behind Claude, launched an internal programme known as “Project Panama”, which concluded that books were “essential” for training advanced AI models. One senior executive at the AI giant said that books taught systems “how to write well”, as opposed to using “low-quality internet speak”. Orders have also come from Canadian company Zoom Books, according to AA, but the company has denied participating in the digitisation and destruction of books for AI development. The absence of disclosure obligations makes it “nearly impossible” for authors and publishers to determine whether their works have been incorporated into AI training datasets. AI systems have been “trained on copyrighted books” and can now produce new books “almost instantly”, leading to an “influx” of “low-cost, AI-generated titles” on digital marketplaces.