Democracy Dies in DarknessCourt filings reveal how AI companies raced to obtain more books to feed chatbots, including by buying, scanning and disposing of millions of titles.Today at 5:00 a.m. EST(Illustration by Alexis Arnold/The Washington Post; iStock)In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document uns...