Unsealed 2025 Anthropic filings tie Project Panama destructive scanning to secondhand book volume spikes

Judge William Alsup ruled Anthropic's use of purchased books for training was transformative and non-infringing under US fair use. Unsealed exhibits detailed Project Panama's goal of removing spines, scanning pages at industrial scale, and recycling remains. Booksellers in London, Edinburgh, and Alnwick recorded unexplained purchases of obscure Latin texts, 18th-century editions, and out-of-print fiction with no apparent collector pattern.

Dealer logs and forum posts indicate sales of titles unsold for years increased after the ruling. Anthropic confirmed acquisition of commercially available datasets but denied targeting rare volumes. UK copyright law requires permission for both corpus creation and training, creating a transatlantic gap. Training runs on low-copy academic works and public-domain rarities supply statistical diversity that web scrapes alone cannot match.

Continued demand for physical copies will pressure inventories of low-print-run editions. If UK rights holders obtain injunctions or EU data rules tighten, acquisition costs rise and scanning shifts offshore. Dealers already report selective withholding of unique copies. Volume data from AbeBooks and dealer associations will show whether the 2025-2026 sales spike persists past the initial legal clarity window.