Jack

We got links to Anthropic's two Super Bowl commercials and Sam's 400-word reply to those commercials in the show notes.

But besties, pause the pot, because we are way more interested in one wild move that got Anthropic to this specific place.

One detail that we only know because it was revealed in court documents.

Because to build its AI, Anthropic bought one million physical books and then destroyed them.

This is a mind-bogglingly large and secret campaign that Anthropic did in 2024, and it's called Project Panama.

Doesn't sound sketchy at all, Jack.

So there's some wonderful reporting here from the Washington Post.

It captures the story, but Jack and I dove in T-boy style for you.

So before OpenAI launched ChatGPT, they downloaded the entire shadow library online known as LibGen.

Jack, what is a shadow library to sprinkle on some context?

It's a massive online library of digital books that are all pirated.

And at the time, about a decade ago, OpenAI was an academic nonprofit.

So to train their large language model, their AI,

they had to upload millions of books.

And nobody really was concerned.

But then when OpenAI started straying from their nonprofit roots and became profit hungry, some early OpenAI people left and launched Anthropic.

And the first thing Anthropic did, what was it, Jack?

The same thing OpenAI did.

They went to that same shadow library, downloaded millions of books, and fed that digital text into Anthropix LLM.

But here's the key.