Just in Case You Needed Another Reason to Hate AI

Quiet Canines Podcast · Jul 31, 2026 · 2m

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury imagined book burning to keep knowledge from the public. In 1984, George Orwell imagined records disappearing into a memory hole so power could control the past. Anthropic had a different motive, but its method belongs in a dystopian novel: destroy physical books and lock their contents inside a corporate system the public cannot inspect.

Anthropic called the operation Project Panama. An internal planning document called it an effort to “destructively scan all the books in the world” and told employees not to discuss it outside Anthropic. Within about a year…