Project Panama: Mass purchase of rare books for AI training

The ‘Project Panama’ initiative has come to light following unusual purchasing patterns reported by antique booksellers worldwide. Booksellers, including Marçal Font of the Librería Fénix in Badalona, Spain, noted suspicious high-volume orders placed within very short timeframes, often involving excessive shipping costs.

Investigations by experts, such as AI researcher Xavier Vinaixa, suggest these mass purchases are part of a trend where companies acquire large quantities of rare and old books to facilitate digital scanning for training artificial intelligence models. Similar concerns regarding the mass acquisition of old books have been reported by dealers in Germany, New Zealand, and the Netherlands.

Critics and booksellers have expressed concern that this practice, described in some reports as a form of ‘cultural barbarism,’ involves the destructive digitalization of unique historical texts to feed AI development.