Anthropic scanned songbooks and threw the paper away, and publishers want the titles

Anthropic bought printed books, tore the bindings off, scanned every page, kept the files and threw the paper away. A federal judge found that last year. Music publishers now say some of those books were songbooks and sheet music collections holding their songs, and on September 11, 2026 they asked a California court to make Anthropic open up the program, as Music Business Worldwide reported. Anthropic told the same court the question can wait.

What Project Panama did to a printed songbook

Anthropic gave the program an internal name, Project Panama, and the mechanics are not complicated.

The publishers say the company “commenced an unauthorized scanning and digitization program” that copied “hundreds or more songbooks and sheet music collections” containing their works. Their filing says Anthropic did it by “purchasing physical books, reproducing them as digital files without authorization, and adding those copies to its central library.”

The stated goal, quoted from Anthropic’s own documents, was to gather “all the books in the world” while dodging as much “legal/practice/business slog” as possible.

Why the publishers are fighting over the order, not the facts

Judge Eumi K. Lee split the evidence gathering into two rounds. Lawyers call that stage discovery, the part of a case where each side has to hand over its documents.

Round one covers the claim that Anthropic downloaded pirated books from shadow libraries. Round two covers the claim that it trained Claude on the publishers’ works, and that round is paused until the judge rules in the older of the two cases.

The publishers want scanning in round one. Anthropic wants it in round two.

Their reason is that scanning and torrenting are cousins. Both, in the publishers’ words, “involve copying books containing Plaintiffs’ works, rather than scraping Plaintiffs’ lyrics from the internet.”

They also told the court that waiting “would serve no purpose but delay,” and pointed out that the pending motions in the first case “address neither torrenting nor destructive scanning.”

Anthropic’s answer is that it already handed this over

Anthropic’s filing runs the other way. “Because those allegations relate entirely to Publishers’ training claim (Count II), they should be addressed in Phase Two,” it states.

The company argues the coming ruling in the first case “will provide important guidance on the book scanning allegations,” so opening the file now risks doing the work twice.

Then it points at size.

Anthropic also says the publishers have been here before. It says they already took evidence on Project Panama in the first case, where the company produced “an extensive index of scanned books,” and that its data acquisition lead Thomas Turvey “testified extensively” about how the program ran and how much it took in.

The words Anthropic’s filing never uses

The two sides do not even name the practice the same way. The publishers call it destructive scanning. Anthropic calls it book scanning, and never once writes songbook or sheet music.

That is not a small thing when the fight is over which books were in the pile.

The publishers lean on a 2024 appeals court ruling against the Internet Archive, which held that scanning and lending copyrighted books without permission was not fair use. Anthropic leans on Judge William Alsup’s June 2025 ruling in the book authors’ case, which held that buying books, scanning them and binning the originals was fair use. Alsup drew his line at keeping pirated copies, and Anthropic settled that case for $1.5 billion.

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We don't want it to be known that we are working on this.

What happens next in the Anthropic music cases

BMG picked a side. Its lawyers signed the September 11 statement jointly with the other publishers, having added the phrase destructive scanning to its own complaint the night before the filings were due.

The queue keeps growing. Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei have each asked the court to throw out parts of the case, with a hearing set for November 4. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued on August 28 over second-hand books, Round Hill filed on August 17, and the parties owe the court a plan for running all of it together by September 23.

Judge Lee had not ruled on the scanning question as of September 17.

If you write songs and your work sits in a printed folio, this is the case that decides whether anyone ever tells you it was scanned. Right now the only people who know which songbooks went through Project Panama are the people who ran it.