The Bill Came for the Books They Stole. Nobody Sent One for the Books They Shredded.

Anthropic paid $1.5 billion to settle claims over pirated books. But another library escaped the settlement entirely: millions of legally purchased books that were cut apart, scanned, and destroyed under Project Panama. This episode examines how the law punished the theft, rewarded the shredding, and left the only surviving copies locked inside a private AI archive. August 1, 2026 —…