A federal judge’s finding that Anthropic’s destructive scanning of legally purchased print books qualifies as fair use has, six months on, reshaped the used-book market on two continents. Court documents unsealed in January 2026 and reported by The Washington Post described “Project Panama,” an internal Anthropic program that ran spines through a hydraulic cutter, scanned the loose pages, and discarded the originals. Planning materials cited capacity of up to 2 million books over six months, or roughly 11,000 a day.

The ruling’s legal footing is narrow but generous. Under the first-sale doctrine, the owner of a physical copy can destroy it; the court separately found the resulting digital file transformative, per TechTimes. That combination is what industry buyers heard.

Anthropic has already agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle claims tied to books it downloaded from the LibGen and PiLiMi repositories. The fair-use finding covered only the physical route, which explains the current scramble for paper.

From April 2026 onward, used-book sellers began reporting bulk orders they didn’t recognize. One anonymous U.S. dealer told 404 Media weekly sales jumped from about 20 books to several hundred, with buyers indifferent to price. In Haarlem, dealer Pieter de Vries told Fortune a Singapore-based firm requested nearly 3,001 academic titles, mostly published 2020–2021, a message he initially took for “spam or phishing.”

ISBNdb briefly marketed bulk AI sourcing of 1,000 to 1 million books under NDA, then removed the pages nine days after publication and told Fortune the service was never launched. Anthropic told the same outlet it doesn’t acquire or destroy rare or antiquarian books. The pre-2022 vintage is the tell: text uncontaminated by the models’ own output. The industry is now paying to shred the last archive of pre-AI prose it can legally get its hands on.

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