A Malwarebytes Lock and Code podcast episode examines claims that artificial intelligence companies are buying, scanning and destroying books to create training data. The report centres on “Project Panama”, a secret Anthropic initiative described in court documents as an effort “to destructively scan all the books in the world”.
The documents were unsealed in January 2026 after authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued Anthropic in 2024, alleging that it had used millions of copyrighted works to train its models. The case expanded to include more than 300,000 writers, and Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the claims in September 2025.
The episode also discusses an investigation by 404 Media reporter Emanuel Maiberg into Amazon’s VGT3 department. Maiberg placed an Apple AirTag in one book from a 1,000-book order and tracked it to a facility outside Las Vegas. According to employees cited by 404 Media, books arriving there are cut apart and scanned. The report presents this as evidence of a wider, potentially commonplace practice among AI companies, rather than proof that every company follows the same process. Maiberg said the resulting digital copies may remain inaccessible except through responses generated by chatbots.