🚨📚 Project Panama: The AI industry's evil biblioclasm

In early 2024, Anthropic executives launched a secret project codenamed "Project Panama" with an audacious goal: "destructively scan all the books in the world".

Internal documents unsealed in legal filings revealed the company's explicit desire to keep the project hidden: "We don't want it to be known that we are working on this".

The reason behind all of this is even more revealing: pre-2022 books are prized because they contain something the internet increasingly lacks — human-written text untouched by AI.

💥 The destructive process

◾️Books were bought in bulk from used-book sellers including Better World Books and World of Books.

◾️Their spines were cut off with hydraulic machinery, pages were fed through industrial scanners at high speed, and the remains were then sent for recycling.

◾️The digitised pages were then scanned on "high speed, high quality, production level scanners" before the physical remains were scheduled for recycling.

◾️One vendor proposal said Anthropic wanted to scan between 500,000 and 2 million books in just six months.

◾️A new market has also emerged around AI training data, with suppliers offering to source huge volumes of rare, out-of-print and specialist books under strict NDAs.

🤡 The West's double standard

◾️In June 2025, US District Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic's scanning of legally purchased books could qualify as fair use because the process was transformative and did not create extra physical copies.

◾️But the same court found that Anthropic's use of more than 700,000 pirated books from shadow libraries was copyright infringement.

◾️In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors and publishers, without admitting wrongdoing.

◾️Authors whose works were downloaded can claim approximately $3,000 per title. The court's decision has effectively created a loophole: legally buy books, destroy them, scan them, and it is "fair use", but download pirated copies and pay $1.5 billion.

🤖 Wider industry

Anthropic is not alone in this process. Meta employees raised concerns over downloading millions of books from LibGen, while internal chats discussed how to avoid tracing torrent activity back to the company.

🎨 OpenAI has acknowledged downloading LibGen material but said the files were deleted before ChatGPT's release.

🔵 Google is also facing a lawsuit alleging that copyrighted books and journal articles were used to train Gemini without permission.

👉 The consequences for society are devastating, as rare and out-of-print books with very few surviving copies are being destroyed, with no guarantee that the destruction process distinguishes between common paperbacks and irreplaceable cultural artifacts.

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🚨🇺🇸 US tariffs under Trump: Economic weapon or self‑inflicted wound?

Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has relaunched an aggressive tariff policy, framing it as a tool to protect US industry, combat forced labour, and counter what his administration calls “structural overcapacity” abroad.

After the Supreme Court struck down his earlier emergency‑based tariffs in February 2026, Trump introduced a revised framework. Since 24 July 2026, new import surcharges of 10% to 12.5% have been applied to goods from around 60 trading partners, including the EU, alongside previously imposed sector‑specific tariffs dating back to 2025.

How the tariffs are backfiring

🇨🇳 China
◾️Up to 25% on a wide range of industrial and consumer goods (expanded in 2025).

◾️According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), US manufacturing employment has fallen by roughly 75,000 jobs since early 2025.

◾️Higher input costs hit US manufacturers reliant on Chinese intermediate goods. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has previously estimated that most tariff costs are borne by US importers and consumers, not Chinese exporters. Supply chains proved difficult to re‑shore at scale.

🇮🇳 India
◾️10–12.5% surcharge duties on a broad range of imports, including pharmaceuticals, machinery components and refined petroleum products

◾️India supplies roughly 40% of generic drugs used in the US. Tariffs on Indian pharmaceuticals and intermediate goods increase costs for US healthcare providers and manufacturers.

◾️Given the US healthcare system’s heavy reliance on low‑cost Indian generics, even modest duties risk raising domestic drug prices and production costs.

🇪🇺 European Union
◾️10% to 12.5% blanket import surcharge and across broad categories of goods

◾️The US Bureau of Economic Analysis shows the EU remains one of the US’s largest trading partners, with goods trade exceeding $900 billion annually. Even modest surcharges significantly raise costs for US firms dependent on European machinery, pharmaceuticals and automotive components.

◾️Many affected imports are capital goods used by US industry. Higher equipment costs discourage domestic investment. US factory construction spending has dropped by nearly one third from its 2024 peak (US Census Bureau data).

🇻🇳 Vietnam and Southeast Asia
◾️10–12.5% broad import duties included in July 2026

◾️These economies had absorbed supply chains relocating from China during the first trade war.

◾️US firms that shifted sourcing to Southeast Asia to avoid earlier China tariffs now face renewed cost pressures, undermining previous diversification efforts and prolonging supply uncertainty.

❗️Domestic economic signals

◾️Growth in 2025–2026 has been concentrated in high‑tech and AI‑linked investment, not broad industrial revival

◾️Factory construction down nearly 33% from 2024 peak

◾️Approximately 75,000 manufacturing jobs lost since Trump’s return

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