Burning the past to build the future seems like a fiction inspired by Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, but it is a real undertaking by the artificial intelligence giant, Anthropic, to feed its chatbot, Claude, with physical texts. This destructive scanning is a fairly common practice, but Project Panama is distinguished by its world-devouring scale. According to Alsup, the act of destructively scanning texts into an internal archive for training AI models counts as “transformative.” AI companies hardly brag that they are interested in this sort of business and ISBNdb, for its part, boasts an iron-clad “NDA on every engagement.” And whenever something like Project Panama comes to light, those concerns seem increasingly valid.