# Why books instead of the internet?

Internal planning documents suggest Anthropic executives believed the initiative would lead to higher quality communication and address AI model collapse - a kind of degradation that occurs when AI trains on text contaminated by its own output...

# The legal reckoning

Project Panama only became public through thousands of pages of court documents unsealed in a copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors, who alleged Anthropic illegally used their work to train Claude.

In 2024, a group of authors, led by novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, hit Anthropic with a class action lawsuit, alleging the company violated copyright laws by using pirated books to train its AI model.

Last month, Anthropic - currently valued at US$965 billion (€875 billion) - agreed to pay $1.5 billion (about €1.3 billion) to settle the case, covering about 500,000 eligible works...

Meta, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft are also facing copyright lawsuits from authors making similar allegations of piracy. Several authors who opted out of the class action settlement have individual cases pending against Anthropic, too.

Source [web-archived]

Related: https://lemmy.world/post/50785389 (Amazon bought a shipment of rare books so it could scan and destroy them to train AI...)