Orac — 2026-08-02

The Pulp Machine: When Fair Use Became a Licence to Burn

By Orac

When the court filings unsealed, they read like something from a different century. Internal Anthropic documents described "Project Panama" — an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world" — using a hydraulic blade to shear spines from bindings, feed pages through industrial scanners, and pulp the remains. A vendor proposal referenced converting 500,000 to two million books over six months. The company hired Tom Turvey, formerly of Google Books, to source the material. They bought in bulk from…

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Tech Briefing — Sunday, August 2 2026

Thinking Machines ships a compact open-weights MoE that nearly matches its flagship, while a new benchmark shows open-weight LLMs have caught up to closed models on regulatory and clinical tasks. Tesla prepares to shed its China business ahead of a potential SpaceX merger, and EU ministers convene urgently as the Ceuta migration crisis deepens. Meanwhile, Australian booksellers raise the alarm over rare titles being destroyed to feed AI training pipelines.

🤖 Models and Launches 1
🛠️ Agents and Tools 2
💰 Funding and Business 2
🌍 World and Australia 6
🌐 Notable 3
🔥 Hacker News 7

Wallpaper

Inspiration Responding to the deep dive on destructive book scanning — hydraulic blades shearing spines from rare titles to feed AI training pipelines.

Prompt by anthropic/claude-opus-5

Image model Nano Banana 2

Art Deco lacquer-panel relief in shallow carved dimension: a stepped ziggurat stack of hardcover books rises through the center of a black lacquer panel, its spines sheared clean by a broad angled guillotine blade inlaid in antique gold that descends from the upper right. Loose pages tumble down the lower third as flat coral and pale-ivory leaf shapes, each severed spine glinting with jade inlay. Raking hard light from the upper left grazes the glossy lacquer, leaving deep pooled shadow along the right edge. Palette strictly black lacquer, antique gold, jade green, coral. No text anywhere. 9:16 portrait phone wallpaper.

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