Filings show Anthropic's Project Panama signed Korean book-purchase contracts for training data

Documents reviewed by The Seoul Economic Daily show that at least 15 works by South Korean writers were among the pirated digital copies Anthropic downloaded in 2021-2022 for training Claude, including Han Kang's "Human Acts" and books by Hwang Sok-yong and Shin Kyung-sook. Anthropic has offered compensation to the Korean authors under the U.S. court's $1.5 billion settlement framework covering the pirated books. Separately, filings submitted to the U.S. court between August and November 2024 show Anthropic's data partnership team was "working on a book purchase agreement with Booxen Korea" and arranging purchases in units of thousands of volumes; publisher Woongjin confirmed to the paper that it signed a contract with Anthropic. The purchases were part of "Project Panama," Anthropic's 2024 program of buying physical books worldwide and scanning them for high-quality training text. The report says Korean books appear to have been sold to Anthropic and used for AI training without the authors' knowledge, and quotes a publishing-industry official noting that South Korea currently has no rules governing the use of sold books for AI training.